Quantitative analysis of doped/undoped ZnO nanomaterials using laser assisted atom probe tomography: Influence of the analysis parameters

In the last decade, atom probe tomography has become a powerful tool to investigate semiconductor and insulator nanomaterials in microelectronics, spintronics, and optoelectronics. In this paper, we report an investigation of zinc oxide nanostructures using atom probe tomography. We observed that the chemical composition of zinc oxide is strongly dependent on the analysis parameters used for atom probe experiments. It was observed that at high laser pulse energies, the electric field at the specimen surface is strongly dependent on the crystallographic directions. This dependence leads to an inhomogeneous field evaporation of the surface atoms, resulting in unreliable measurements. We show that the laser pulse energy has to be well tuned to obtain reliable quantitative chemical composition measurements of undoped and doped ZnO nanomaterials.