SBIR Phase II: Photon Enhanced SEM (Scanning Electron Microscopes) Platform for Nano-Manufacturing

这个小企业创新研究（SBIR）二期项目旨在开发一个光子增强和电子束诱导纳米级加工的平台。聚焦电子束诱导加工是一种纳米级工艺，通常能够达到10nm左右的分辨率，并且已经证明了1nm的分辨率。然而，通过聚焦纳米电子束诱导沉积（EBID）沉积的材料由于前体分子的副产物解吸不足而含有大量残留污染。此外，电子束诱导蚀刻（EBIE）通常受到所产生的电子束诱导蚀刻产物解吸的限制，因此速度非常慢。该项目将通过开发一种能够提供脉冲光子束的仪器来解决这些限制，以促进EBID过程中污染副产物的解吸，并加速EBIE过程中蚀刻产物的解吸。目标是设计和构建一个能够在宽光谱范围内精确传递光子的平台，用于纳米级处理和同时在标准扫描电子显微镜（SEM）或双离子和电子束系统中进行微尺度成像。最后，必要的脉冲电子-光子-质量输运同步策略将开发先进的纳米级原型，编辑和样品制备。该项目的更广泛/商业影响将是开发一种新工具，通过提供一种具有成本效益的解决方案，使纳米级合成与广泛的扫描电镜和双光束平台兼容，从而改进纳米级器件的快速原型制作。这将加速下一代纳米级器件的研究工作，这些器件具有新的和/或增强的功能，有望使从物理到生命科学等社会的许多方面受益。该项目还可能提高对关键光子-电子-衬底-蒸气相互作用的理解，这将最终导致定向组装方法能够沉积三维，复杂和多组分材料，具有纳米级横向分辨率和原子尺度z维度控制。

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project aims to develop a platform for photon beam enhanced and electron beam induced nanoscale processing. Focused electron beam induced processing is a nanoscale process generally capable of about 10nm resolution and 1nm has been demonstrated. However, materials deposited via focused nanoscale electron beam induced deposition (EBID) contain significant amounts of residual contamination due to insufficient by-product desorption from the precursor molecules. In addition, electron beam induced etching (EBIE) is typically limited by desorption of the resultant electron beam induced etch product, thus is prohibitively slow. This project will address these limitations by developing an instrument capable of delivering a pulsed photon beam to facilitate desorption of contaminate by-products for the EBID process, and accelerate desorption of etch products during the EBIE process. The objective is to design and construct a platform capable of precise delivery of photons over a broad spectroscopic range for nanoscale processing and simultaneous microscale imaging in standard scanning electron microscopes (SEM) or dual ion and electron beam systems. Finally, requisite pulsed electron-photon-mass transport synchronization strategies will be developed for advanced nanoscale prototyping, editing, and sample preparation. The broader/commercial impact of this project will be the development of a new tool to enable improved rapid prototyping of nanoscale devices by offering a cost-effective solution for nanoscale synthesis compatible with widespread SEM and dual beam platforms. This will accelerate the research efforts on next generation nanoscale devices with new and/or enhanced functionality, which is expected to benefit many facets of society ranging from physical to life sciences. This project may also improve the understanding of critical photon-electron-substrate-vapor interactions which will ultimately lead to a directed assembly approach capable of depositing 3-dimensional, complex and multi-component materials with nanometer scale lateral resolution and atomic scale z-dimensional control.