Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) are currently supporting ground-breaking basic research in materials science and metallurgy as they allow in situ experiments on materials at the nanoscale within electron-microscopes in a wide variety of different conditions such as extreme materials dynamics under ultrafast heating and quenching rates as well as in complex electro-chemical environments. Electron-transparent sample preparation for MEMS e-chips remains a challenge for this technology as the existing methodologies can introduce contaminants, thus disrupting the experiments and the analysis of results. Herein we introduce a methodology for simple and fast electron-transparent sample preparation for MEMS e-chips without significant contamination. The quality of the samples as well as their performance during a MEMS e-chip experiment in situ within an electron-microscope are evaluated during a heat treatment of a crossover AlMgZn(Cu) alloy.
@article{arxiv.2012.02941,
title = {A contamination-free electron-transparent metallic sample preparation method for MEMS experiments with in situ S/TEM},
author = {Matheus A. Tunes and Cameron Quick and Lukas Stemper and Diego S. R. Coradini and Jakob Grasserbauer and Phillip Dumitraschkewitz and Thomas M. Kremmer and Stefan Pogatscher},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.02941},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
Preprint submitted to Microscopy and Microanalysis