Recent Developments in Femtosecond Laser-Enabled TriBeam Systems

Abstract

Streams of multimodal three-dimensional (3D) and four-dimensional (4D) data are revolutionizing our ability to design and predict the behavior of a broad array of advanced materials systems. Over the last 10 years, a new 3D imaging platform consisting of a femtosecond (fs) pulsed laser coupled with a focused ion beam scanning electron microscope (FIB SEM) has been developed by UC Santa Barbara in collaboration with Thermo Fisher Scientific (formerly FEI). The femtosecond-laser-enabled FIB SEM, called the TriBeam, has become one of the only 3D serial sectioning methods available that can gather millimeter-scaled multimodal datasets at sub-μm voxel resolutions; these length scales are critical for many materials problems. Multimodal chemical, crystallographic, and morphological information can be gathered rapidly on a layer-by-layer basis and reconstructed in 3D. Large (gigabyte to terabyte scale) 3D datasets have been generated for a broad array of materials systems, including metallic alloys, ceramics, biomaterials, polymer- and ceramic-matrix composites, and semiconductors. The research tasks conducted have resulted in a completely new design, operating with a dual-wavelength femtosecond-pulsed laser on a plasma focused ion beam (PFIB) platform.