Publication details
Mechanism of electron-photon conversion in YAG: Ce scintillator for SEM electron detectors
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2013 |
| Type | Article in Proceedings |
| Conference | Proceedings of the Microscopy Conference 2013 |
| Citation | |
| Description | The Everhart-Thornley imaging detector is commonly used one in SEM. In such a detector, the signal electrons are accelerated towards a conductively coated scintillator where they are converted to the visible photons within the cathodoluminescence (CL). The emitted photons are guided out of a vacuum chamber and detected by a photon detector. The scintillator is still a bottleneck of the signal electron detector, because its CL properties can highly affect the scanned image quality. For example, low CL efficiency of the scintillator can result in poor signal-to-noise ratio of the detector. Also long CL decay time can decrease the image contrast during the fast scanning. These problems highly motivate to clearly understand how the energy of the signal electron is converted in the scintillator. This knowledge is essential for modification of the scintillator properties in order to improve the SEM image quality. |