ISSN 0004-881X

Quantitative Assessment of Stress Fields in Ceramic and Semiconductor Materials in the Scanning Electron Mircoscope

by Giuseppe Pezzotti(1)*, Alessandro Alan Porporati(2), Andrea Leto(1) and Wenliang Zhu(3)
(1)Ceramic Physics Laboratory & Research Institute for Nanoscience, Kyoto Institute of Technology, Matsugasaki, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8585, Japan
(2)Research Institute for Nanoscience, Kyoto Institute of Technology, Matsugasaki, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8585, Japan
(3)Ceramic Physics Laboratory, Kyoto Institute of Technology, Matsugasaki, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8585, Japan

Abstract

The piezo-spectroscopic (PS) effect, which may be defined as the shift in wavelength of a spectroscopic transition in a solid in response to an applied strain or stress, may occur both in crystalline and in amorphous structures, regardless of the particular spectroscopic transition involved, and independent of the specific mechanism of luminescence emission (i.e., including spectra generated from substitutional impurities, optically active point defects, etc.). The PS effect can be monitored in the scanning electron microscope on electro-stimulated spectra when the scale needed for the characterization lie on a nanometer scale. The PS effect, being a physical property of the studied material, should be calibrated case by case. The high scanning speed (and computer control) of the electron beam, which can be easily obtained with scan coils, is unsurpassed. Since the most recently developed devices have active areas of sub-micron dimensions and many of them less than 100 nm, no obvious choice is left but urgently developing an electro-stimulated probe for nano-scale residual stress assessments. In this paper, we show the feasibility of nano-scale stress assessments in the scanning electron microscope for selected paradigm ceramic, glass and semiconductor materials.

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