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Journal of Electron Microscopy Advance Access originally published online on August 25, 2005
Journal of Electron Microscopy 2005 54(4):361-365; doi:10.1093/jmicro/dfi044
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© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Japanese Society of Microscopy. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Noise in secondary electron emission: the low yield case

Ludek Frank*

Institute of Scientific Instruments ASCR, Královopolská 147, 61264 Brno, Czech Republic

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: ludek{at}isibrno.cz

Studies concerning assessment of the image quality in scanning electron microscopes and studies evaluating the detective efficiency of the secondary electron (SE) detectors in these microscopes must be based on statistics of SE emission. The vast majority of previous studies have applied Poisson statistics, although their prerequisites have not been satisfied in most cases. This paper is concerned with the limits to the applicability of Poisson statistics to SE emission. Adequate definition of a non-Poisson factor in the variance of the number of SEs emitted is discussed, and a simple formula for this factor is derived for the low yield case in which both the primary and the backscattered electron are assumed not to release more than one SE. These conditions are met with conductive specimens composed of light elements at primary electron (PE) energies of tens of keV. For the lightest specimens, such as carbon, the non-Poisson factor can even be neglected for PEs >10 keV.

Keywords     secondary electrons, noise, SEM image noise, secondary emission noise, statistics of secondary electrons, non-Poisson factor

Received     22 January 2005, accepted 8 June 2005


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