Focused ion beam characterization of plasma-assisted deposition on polymer films at the nanoscale.

In this paper, a novel technique is presented for the characterization at the nanoscale of plasma-assisted deposit on polyethylene-terephthalate (PET) polymer films. In previous studies, some microcharacterization and morphology analyses of plasma-assisted deposition were performed by atomic force microscopy (AFM). In the work presented here, we analysed the thickness and homogeneity of plasma-assisted deposits by focused ion beam (FIB). This technique with 5-7 nm resolution requires no sample preparation and relies on a sequence of operations on a relatively fast time scale, so that it is easy to make thorough investigations of the sample. We performed electron and ion imaging of the surface of the material, and a subsequent ionic cutting allowed the study of the morphology of the same sample. We developed a novel approach to the edge detection techniques (EDT) in images for a fast evaluation and monitoring of the deposited layer.