Time response measurement of pulsed electron beam from InGaN photocathode

The photocurrent from a semiconductor photocathode with a negative-electron affinity surface can be arbitrarily controlled by the excitation laser power. Applying this characteristic to a scanning electron microscope allows the probe current to be arbitrarily controlled at any location on the sample. A photocathode with a fast time response is required to control the probe current at high speed. This study used an InGaN photocathode for pulsed electron beam generation and investigated its time response. A pulsed electron beam with 3.8 ns pulse width and 8.1 × 10³ A cm⁻² current density was observed, and the rise and fall times of the photocurrent were found to be 1.7 and 2.0 ns, respectively. The results show that despite the bottleneck of the time response of the laser power, the InGaN photocathode generates an electron beam that can control the probe current on a pixel-by-pixel for a 270 MHz scan speed.