A high spatial resolution non-contact temperature measurement and mapping technique

Case ID: 1506

Web Published: 5/12/2014

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Temperature Mapping by Electron Probe in Scanning Electron Microscope

Rensselaer researchers have developed a scanning electron microscopy based temperature mapping technique which employs a temperature sensitive electron signal for nano-scale resolution, non-contact measurement. It provides enhanced capabilities for investigating heat generation and transfer at the nanoscale to address long-standing issues related to power consumption, heat dissipation and energy conversion efficiency in many current and future generation nano-engineered systems.

Detection of nano-scale temperature distribution is important for studies of heat generation and transfer in a wide range of nano-engineering systems; however, no current temperature mapping techniques (mainly contact probe techniques, optical techniques, and thin coating methods) adequately combine both nano-scale resolution and far-field (~ cm away from the sample) non-contact mapping capabilities, which are required. Rensselaer researchers developed a novel SEM-based technique capable of nano-scale resolution temperature mapping without the temperature perturbations from which contact or near-field temperature mapping techniques suffer. These capabilities address issues in nano-scale heat generation and transfer research. Since the hardware setup of the technique is compatible with existing SEMs, implementation only requires relatively straight-forward SEM software modification to extract the temperature sensitive signal with the hardware largely unchanged, rendering commercialization inexpensive to existing EBSD-enabled SEM systems.

Figure: Summary of nano-scale temperature measurement by EBSD analysis. Top left – experimental geometry. Top right – part of typical EBSD pattern from Si(001). Bottom left – intensity scans across (400) Si Kikuchi line at different temperatures. Bottom right – calibration of normalized peak intensity vs. temperature.

PUBLICATIONS X. Wu and R. Hull, “A novel nano-scale non-contact temperature measurement technique for crystalline materials,” Nanotechnology, 23, 465707 (2012)

X. Wu and R. Hull, “The material dependence of temperature measurement resolution in thermal scanning electron microscopy,” Appl. Phys. Lett., 102, 113107

(2013)

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