PSEUDO-KIKUCHI PATTERN DEGRADATION BY A THIN AMORPHOUS SILICON FILM

Measurements are reported which show that a few tens of angstroms of an amorphous adlayer of silicon on a single-crystal (111) silicon surface produces a measurable degradation in the pseudo-Kikuchi backscattered electron pattern of this surface. Normalized pattern quality, as defined in this work, is shown to decrease rapidly with adlayer film thickness and to become effectively zero at 350 Å for a primary electron beam accelerating voltage of 21.3 kV. At 5 kV, the normalized pattern quality was effectively zero for all measurable film thicknesses (thickness measurement limit was ∼20 ± 20 Å). © 1969 The American Institute of Physics.