Design of an aberration corrected low-voltage SEM

The low-voltage foil corrector is a novel type of foil aberration corrector that can correct for both the spherical and chromatic aberration simultaneously. In order to give a realistic example of the capabilities of this corrector, a design for a low-voltage scanning electron microscope with the low-voltage foil corrector is presented. A fully electrostatic column has been designed and characterised by using aberration integrals and ray tracing calculations. The amount of aberration correction can be adjusted relatively easy. The third order spherical and the first order chromatic aberration can be completely cancelled. In the zero current limit, a FW50 probe size of 1.0 nm at 1 kV can be obtained. This probe size is mainly limited by diffraction and by the fifth order spherical aberration.