Focused ion-beam specimen preparation for atom probe field-ion microscopy characterization of multilayer film structures

Focused ion-beam milling with a sub-10 nm diameter beam of gallium ions has been used to fabricate field-ion specimens from a multilayer film nanostructure containing 100 repetitions of a bilayer deposited directly onto a planar substrate. Successful field-ion specimen preparation has allowed the observation of these layers on the atomic scale by both field-ion imaging and atom probe compositional analysis.