A high signal-to-noise ratio toroidal electron spectrometer for the SEM

This paper presents a high signal-to-noise ratio electron energy spectrometer attachment for the scanning electron microscope (SEM), designed to measure changes in specimen surface potential from secondary electrons and extract specimen atomic number information from backscattered electrons. Experimental results are presented, which demonstrate that the spectrometer can in principle detect specimen voltage changes well into the sub-mV range, and distinguish close atomic numbers by a signal-to-noise ratio of better than 20. The spectrometer has applications for quantitatively mapping specimen surface voltage and atomic number variations on the nano-scale.