A successful lift-out is a short, exacting sequence. Each step has to be repeatable, because a busy lab runs it many times a day.
- Approach. Drive the probe to the milled lamella. Spherical, backlash-free motion with sub-nanometre resolution lets you close the last micrometres without overshoot.
- Attach. Bond the probe to the lamella, by ion-beam redeposition or, weld-free, with SemGlu vacuum-safe adhesive to avoid contaminating the contact.
- Cut free. Mill the final tab so the lamella releases cleanly onto the probe.
- Transfer. Carry the lamella to the TEM grid. Encoded systems recall the grid position exactly, so the move is the same every time.
- Mount & thin. Fix the lamella to the post and finish-thin to electron transparency.
Why closed-loop helps#
With the encoded MM3E you can define the parking, lamella and grid positions once and recall them at the click of a button, giving placement reproducibility better than 2 µm, the difference between a hand-tuned art and a repeatable, high-yield process.
