EBIC environmental STEM microscopy for energy materials and gas sensors

Electron Beam induced current (EBIC) is an electron probe technique widely used in the semiconductor industry for the analysis of p-n junctions, minority carrier distributions, and material defects. It has been developed for the SEM environment with the spatial resolution limited to tens of nanometres. Aberration corrected STEM (scanning transmission electron microscopy) is able to provide atomic scale resolution but cannot benefit from commercially available EBIC packages.

This project goal is to develop EBIC analyses techniques for STEM microscopy allowing to studying material defects and electric properties of thin films down to the atomic scale. This development combined with the unique capabilities of the double aberration corrected gas environmental STEM in York, will open the path for the fundamental study of the electric properties in nanomaterials during gas environment exposure as well as the effect of electric bias on phase transformation as such as oxidation and reduction.

This technique once developed will be applied to materials for solar cell structures and gas sensing devices.