Applied Microscopy

Korean Society of Microscopy (한국현미경학회)
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Cross-sectional TEM Specimen Preparation of GaN-based Thinfilm Materials Using Alumina Dummy Filler

Alumina dummy 충전재를 이용한 GaN 기반 박막재료의 단면 TEM 시편준비

  • Received : 2009.08.14
  • Accepted : 2009.09.14
  • Published : 2009.09.30
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Abstract

Practical difficulties for preparing a good crosssectional specimen of GaN-based materials for transmission electron microscopy have arisen due to large difference of mechanical properties between hard ceramic substrate and soft GaN-layered materials. Uneven polishing, sudden cracking, delamination, and selective sputtering during the conventional wedge polishing technique are often encountered as experimental hindrances. The preparation technique based on Strecker's method can be applied to overcome these difficulties, which eventually leads to mechanically stable TEM samples independent of the mechanical properties of materials. The basic idea is to use hard ceramic dummy filler for embedding the sample of interest into the dummy frame. In this study, we applied this technique into preparing cross-sectional TEM specimen of the GaN-based materials with mechanical instability and demonstrated usefulness of this hard dummy filler method in which the possible modifications of the sample of interest during the preparation must be avoidable. In addition, practical precautions during the preparation were discussed.

Keywords

References

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