209 research outputs found
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EUV MET Printing and Actinic Imaging Analysis of The Effects of Phase Defects on Wafer CDs
Continuous Diffraction of Molecules and Disordered Molecular Crystals
The diffraction pattern of a single non-periodic compact object, such as a
molecule, is continuous and is proportional to the square modulus of the
Fourier transform of that object. When arrayed in a crystal, the coherent sum
of the continuous diffracted wave-fields from all objects gives rise to strong
Bragg peaks that modulate the single-object transform. Wilson statistics
describe the distribution of continuous diffraction intensities to the same
extent that they apply to Bragg diffraction. The continuous diffraction
obtained from translationally-disordered molecular crystals consists of the
incoherent sum of the wave-fields from the individual rigid units (such as
molecules) in the crystal, which is proportional to the incoherent sum of the
diffraction from the rigid units in each of their crystallographic
orientations. This sum over orientations modifies the statistics in a similar
way that crystal twinning modifies the distribution of Bragg intensities. These
statistics are applied to determine parameters of continuous diffraction such
as its scaling, the beam coherence, and the number of independent wave-fields
or object orientations contributing. Continuous diffraction is generally much
weaker than Bragg diffraction and may be accompanied by a background that far
exceeds the strength of the signal. Instead of just relying upon the smallest
measured intensities to guide the subtraction of the background it is shown how
all measured values can be utilised to estimate the background, noise, and
signal, by employing a modified "noisy Wilson" distribution that explicitly
includes the background. Parameters relating to the background and signal
quantities can be estimated from the moments of the measured intensities. The
analysis method is demonstrated on previously-published continuous diffraction
data measured from imperfect crystals of photosystem II.Comment: 34 pages, 11 figures, 2 appendice
Progress and Poverty—1965 Version
The first hard X-ray laser, the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), produces 120 shots per second. Particles injected into the X-ray beam are hit randomly and in unknown orientations by the extremely intense X-ray pulses, where the femtosecond-duration X-ray pulses diffract from the sample before the particle structure is significantly changed even though the sample is ultimately destroyed by the deposited X-ray energy. Single particle X-ray diffraction experiments generate data at the FEL repetition rate, resulting in more than 400,000 detector readouts in an hour, the data stream during an experiment contains blank frames mixed with hits on single particles, clusters and contaminants. The diffraction signal is generally weak and it is superimposed on a low but continually fluctuating background signal, originating from photon noise in the beam line and electronic noise from the detector. Meanwhile, explosion of the sample creates fragments with a characteristic signature. Here, we describe methods based on rapid image analysis combined with ion Time-of-Flight (ToF) spectroscopy of the fragments to achieve an efficient, automated and unsupervised sorting of diffraction data. The studies described here form a basis for the development of real-time frame rejection methods, e. g. for the European XFEL, which is expected to produce 100 million pulses per hour. (C)2014 Optical Society of Americ
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Evaluating EUV mask pattern imaging with two EUV microscopes
Aerial image measurement plays a key role in the development of patterned reticles for each generation of lithography. Studying the field transmitted (reflected) from EUV masks provides detailed information about potential disruptions caused by mask defects, and the performance of defect repair strategies, without the complications of photoresist imaging. Furthermore, by measuring the continuously varying intensity distribution instead of a thresholded, binary resist image, aerial image measurement can be used as feedback to improve mask and lithography system modeling methods. Interest in EUV, at-wavelength, aerial image measurement lead to the creation of several research tools worldwide. These tools are used in advanced mask development work, and in the evaluation of the need for commercial at-wavelength inspection tools. They describe performance measurements of two such tools, inspecting the same EUV mask in a series of benchmarking tests that includes brightfield and darkfield patterns. One tool is the SEMATECH Berkeley Actinic Inspection Tool (AIT) operating on a bending magnet beamline at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Advanced Light Source. The AIT features an EUV Fresnel zoneplate microscope that emulates the numerical aperture of a 0.25-NA stepper, and projects the aerial image directly onto a CCD camera, with 700x magnification. The second tool is an EUV microscope (EUVM) operating at the NewSUBARU synchrotron in Hyogo, Japan. The NewSUBARU tool projects the aerial image using a reflective, 30x Schwarzschild objective lens, followed by a 10-200x x-ray zooming tube. The illumination conditions and the imaging etendue are different for the two tools. The benchmarking measurements were used to determine many imaging and performance properties of the tools, including resolution, modulation transfer function (MTF), aberration magnitude, aberration field-dependence (including focal-plane tilt), illumination uniformity, line-edge roughness, and flare. These measurements reveal the current state of the art in at-wavelength inspection performance, and will be a useful reference as performance improves over time
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Extreme Ultraviolet Phase Contrast Imaging
The conclusions of this report are: (1) zone plate microscopy provides high resolution imaging of EUV masks; (2) using phase plates in the back focal plane of the objective lens can provide contrast mechanisms for measurement of the phase shift from defects on the mask; (3) the first high resolution EUV Zernike phase contrast images have been acquired; and (4) future work will include phase contrast mode in reflection from an EUV mask to directly measure the reflectivity and phase shift from defects
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EUV mask reflectivity measurements with micro-scale spatial resolution
The effort to produce defect-free mask blanks for EUV lithography relies on increasing the detection sensitivity of advanced mask inspection tools, operating at several wavelengths. They describe the unique measurement capabilities of a prototype actinic (EUV) wavelength microscope that is capable of detecting small defects and reflectivity changes that occur on the scale of microns to nanometers. The defects present in EUV masks can appear in many well-known forms: as particles that cause amplitude or phase variations in the reflected field; as surface contamination that reduces reflectivity and contrast; and as damage from inspection and use that reduces the reflectivity of the multilayer coating. This paper presents an overview of several topics where scanning actinic inspection makes a unique contribution to EUVL research. They describe the role of actinic scanning inspection in defect repair studies, observations of laser damage, actinic inspection following scanning electron microscopy, and the detection of both native and programmed defects
Strongly aligned gas-phase molecules at Free-Electron Lasers
We demonstrate a novel experimental implementation to strongly align
molecules at full repetition rates of free-electron lasers. We utilized the
available in-house laser system at the coherent x-ray imaging beamline at the
Linac Coherent Light Source. Chirped laser pulses, i. e., the direct output
from the regenerative amplifier of the Ti:Sa chirped pulse amplification laser
system, were used to strongly align 2,5-diiodothiophene molecules in a
molecular beam. The alignment laser pulses had pulse energies of a few mJ and a
pulse duration of 94 ps. A degree of alignment of
\left = 0.85 was measured, limited by the
intrinsic temperature of the molecular beam rather than by the available laser
system. With the general availability of synchronized chirped-pulse-amplified
near-infrared laser systems at short-wavelength laser facilities, our approach
allows for the universal preparation of molecules tightly fixed in space for
experiments with x-ray pulses.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure
Femtosecond x-ray diffraction from an aerosolized beam of protein nanocrystals
We demonstrate near-atomic-resolution Bragg diffraction from aerosolized
single granulovirus crystals using an x-ray free-electron laser. The form of
the aerosol injector is nearly identical to conventional liquid-microjet
nozzles, but the x-ray-scattering background is reduced by several orders of
magnitude by the use of helium carrier gas rather than liquid. This approach
provides a route to study the weak diffuse or lattice-transform signal arising
from small crystals. The high speed of the particles is particularly well
suited to upcoming MHz-repetition-rate x-ray free-electron lasers
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