Plasma-Derived Low Temperature Ion Source

Focused ion beams (FIBs) employing a plasma ion source are employed in research and industrial applications, including nanotechnology, biotechnology, semiconductor manufacture, and energy exploration. Noble gas ion beams of argon, krypton, and xenon are of particular importance in preparation of samples for high-precision microscopy. Today’s noble gas ion sources excel at preparation of these samples because of their inert nature, and because they can rapidly remove of large quantities of material. Despite these benefit of noble gas ion beams, the current generation of plasma FIBs are not typically used in important high-resolution nanomachining tasks, like circuit edit for semiconductor devices, because they lack the ability to be focused tightly for milling fine features. In this SBIR project, a new source of noble-gas ions will be developed that addresses limitations in today’s commercially available plasma FIBs. This ion source will increase the precision of these instruments by 10x by reducing the focal spot size of the beam. It will retain all of the advantages of existing plasma ion sources, such as high material removal rates. The new ion source technology works by photoionizing laser-cooled atoms to create a bright beam that can be focused to a few-nm in size. The aim of Phase I research and development is to design, build, and test a prototype Ar+ noble gas ion source appropriate for future use in FIB instruments. The research will focus on producing high-brightness beams with a currents up to several nano-Amperes. Advances in the technology supported by these efforts will enable use of noble-gas ion beams in applications such as nanofabrication, and transmission electron microscopy, and atom probe tomography. The result of Phase I will be a working ion source prototype ready for integration with a FIB instrument in Phase II. After this integration is complete, FIB instruments including the new noble gas ion source will be ready for commercial deployment. These instruments will aid academic and commercial researchers in diverse set of fields such as biology, material science, radiometry, and semiconductor manufacture.