CHEMICAL MICROIMAGING AND MICROSPECTROSCOPY OF SURFACES WITH A PHOTOEMISSION MICROSCOPE

Rie applied element sensitive photoemission electron microscopy (PEEM) to investigate surfaces of devices built from complex materials. Conv entional PEEM suffers from lack of information about the chemical comp osition of the imaged surface, Such information can be obtained by PEE M via tuning the photon energy to X-ray absorption edges. To apply spe ctromicroscopy we acquired and subtracted microscopic images using pho ton energies just below and at the edges. The resulting difference giv es a micro-image of the lateral distribution of a specific element. Mi crospectroscopy is performed by recording the intensity of secondary e lectrons in selected spots during a sweep of the photon energy. We app lied both methods to microstructured devices using soft X-ray synchrot ron radiation and found that small local defects and chemical differen ces can be easily detected.