Tracking of atomic planes in atom probe tomography

Atom probe tomography is a ubiquitous method in materials science and engineering capable of revealing the atomic-level three-dimensional composition of a plethora of materials. Beside the nature of atoms forming the analyzed material, atom probe data are also known to contain information on the crystallography. In particular, remnants of the atomic plane sets forming on the surface of the tip-shaped samples are commonly found in atom probe data sets of crystalline metallic materials. The plane remnants can be utilized to correlate the nano-scale chemical analysis that atom probe tomography provides with the crystallographic structure on the same scale. We describe a protocol to reveal and track the atomic planes systematically from raw atom probe data. We demonstrate for both metals and semiconductors that the extracted crystallographic can be used to calibrate a dynamic reconstruction of the respective data set acquired in atom probe tomography. Furthermore, we utilize the crystal planes to make precise measurements of layer thicknesses in atom probe data of semiconductor heterostructures.

Mots clés

• semiconductor heterostructures
• data processing
• metallic materials
• crystal structure
• crystallography
• microscopy
• tomography
• nanomaterials