Recent progress in gas field ion source technology

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Abstract
The advent of nanostructurization technology has also strongly pushed the development of finely focused ion beams of high intensity. While the liquid-metal ion source, LMIS, has already marked a major breakthrough with regard to the available target current densities during the last decade, the gas field ion source, GFIS, has more recently presented an even more promising solution to the problem of ion-beam processing of macroscopic target areas in reasonable time scales. In particular, this progress has been achieved by controlled generation of a small protrusion, called supertip, on top of a regular field emitter tip. In this way, ion current densities of up to 100 A/cm2 appear feasible for certain gases, such as hydrogen, helium, and neon with spot diameters down to 10 nm. Compared to the LMIS, this means an increase in target current density of more than one order of magnitude. The relevant parameters of our supertip GFIS system, characterizing source and ion optics, are given and some first ionographic applications in the fields of optical patterning and topographical structurization, demonstrating the state of the art, are discussed.

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