Methodology exploration of specimen preparation for atom probe tomography from nanowires

Semiconductor nanowires have been intensively explored for applications in electronics, photonics, energy conversion and storage. A fundamental and quantitative understanding of growth-structure-property relationships is central to applications where nanowires exhibit clear advantages. Atom Probe Tomography (APT) is able to provide 3 dimensional quantitative elemental distributions at atomic-resolution and is therefore unique in understanding the growth-structure-property relationships. However, the specimen preparation with nanowires is extremely challenging. In this paper, two ion beam free specimen preparation methods for APT are presented which are efficient for various nanowires.