Having Your Cake and Eating It Too: A Procedure for Obtaining Plan View and Cross Section TEM Images from the Same Site

Abstract

Sample preparation for Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) is usually performed such that the final sample orientation is either a cross section or a plan view of the bulk material, as shown schematically in Figure 1. The object of any sample preparation technique, for either of these two orientations, is to thin a selected volume of the sample from its initial bulk state to electron transparency, ~ 100nm thick. In doing so, the final sample must be mechanically stable, vacuum compatible, and, most of all, unchanged from the initial bulk material. Many techniques have been used to achieve this goal: cleaving, sawing, mechanical polishing, chemical etching, ion milling, focused ion beam (FIB) milling, and many others.