Observations on charging effects of non-conductive and uncoated materials by ion beam pre-bombardment in scanning electron microscopy

Ultrastructural examination of dentin using focused ion-beam cross-sectioning and transmission electron microscopy

“…Ion beam techniques have long been used for material removal in biological materials to 'etch' away surface layers of the targeted material by bombarding it with ionized gas molecules. This has been utilized to enhance the underlying microstructure for highly detailed structural observations (e.g., Lewis et al, 1968;Kanaya et al, 1982;Yonehara et al, 1989) and also in studies of dentin-adhesive interfaces (e.g., Van Meerbeek et al, 1992;Inokoshi et al, 1993a,b) and dentin restorative systems (e.g, Inokoshi et al, 1993a,b). Most of these studies have employed an ion beam from a gas discharge of an inert gas (typically argon), though more recently, 'focused' ion beams (FIB) that utilize a liquid metal (typically gallium) source (Orloff et al, 2003) to produce a probe of small diameter, now close to 10 nm (Van Es et al, 2004), are increasingly being used in large number of applications such as metrology, inspection, cross sectioning, failure analysis, mask-less micromachining, and preparation of thin foils for TEM (Reyntjens and Puers, 2001).…”

Tissue preparation for reconstruction of large‐scale three‐dimensional structures using a scanning electron microscope

“…Electron cyclotron resonance (EeR) plasma etching Ion bombardment or plasma etching have been used to improve surface quality of tissue samples prior to SEM examination (Humphreys et al, 1979;Kanaya et al, 1982;Kuzirian & Leighton, 1983). Images taken from sections 1 JLm (Humphreys et ai., 1979) and 0'2 JLm (Sasaki & Kishida, 1989) thick clearly show residues from cytoplasmic, mitochondrial, and plasma membranes.…”

An application of scanned focused ion beam milling to studies on the internal morphology of small arthropods

“…Ion milling is routinely used in many microscopy-related applications, such as transmission electron microscopy (TEM) specimen thinning, surface cleaning for Auger analysis and in secondary ion mass spectroscopy (SIMS). Ion beam techniques have been used for the removal of surface layers from biological material to reveal underlying features (Kanaya et al, 1982(Kanaya et al, , 1992aYonehara et al, 1989). These ,studies generally use an ion beam in the micrometres to millimetres diameter range, extracted from a gas discharge (Brown, 1989), and etch relatively large areas of the specimen.…”

“…Therefore, milling large holes is not recommended as a primary means of investigation. In addition, waxy materials may not be milled effectively and may appear to 'melt' under the influence of the ion beam, although studies using argon-ion etching on polystyrene latex (Kanaya et al, 1982) demonstrated that the temperature rise was insdcient for melting to occur under their conditions: this suggests that the apparent melting may not be a thermal effect but may be a scattering/charge effect. However, hole milling can be very useful in obtaining confirmatory evidence, or for the examination of structures that cannot be studied by other techniques.…”