The HAXPES-Lab: How it works and what it can do for the electronics industry

Hard X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (HAXPES) is an extremely powerful analytical tool for characterizing and understanding materials. Synchrotron HAXPES typically uses a tunable, focused X-ray beam in the tender spectrum (2.0 keV to 7.5 keV) to probe the depth-dependent chemical, electronic, and molecular structure near the surface of material with a wide range of probing depths (approx. 3 to 30 nm below the surface). The spot size at the sample can be focused to as small as ~50 μm. Unfortunately, HAXPES remains a relatively unknown and often underutilized technique due to its requirement of a large synchrotron facility.

Now, recent advancements in laboratory-based X-ray generation technology have finally enabled the development of a compact, economically viable, and fully-featured laboratory-based HAXPES platform. The HAXPES-Lab, created by Scienta Omicron, utilizes the revolutionary Excillum liquid Ga MatalJet X-ray source to generate a focused ~10 keV photon beam with comparable brightness to some synchrotron sources. This high energy X-ray source provides information from as deep as 50 nm below the sample surface with a sub 50 μm spot size. With its added Al K-alpha XPS source, the HAXPES-Lab is capable of non-destructive depth profiling from the surface to the bulk of thin films, nanoparticles, and more. In addition, the HAXPES-Lab manipulator is capable of biasing devices, charge neutralization of insulators, and temperature control between ~200 – 1300 K during measurement.

In this talk, Dr. Matt Wahila will explain this useful spectroscopy technique, describe the capabilities of the new HAXPES-Lab system at Binghamton University, and provide some examples of its utility for current materials science and microelectronics research.

Speaker(s): Matt Wahila,

Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/303970