Focussed beams for use in EBSD

Focussed beams (electrons, ions, and photons) are at the forefront of today’s and future scientific and engineering advanced research instruments. The beams are typically used for six purposes: imaging, detection, deposition, implantation, milling/ablation, and polishing. There are plethora of detectable and useful signals coming from the beam irradiated matter. One of the signals is electron diffraction and scattering on a crystal planes used by electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) method. This surface superficial probing technique is sensitive to surface contamination, amorphisation, and lattice distortions, thus requires damage-free sample surface preparation techniques. The advent of coupled multi-beam commercial instruments (DualBeams, CrossBeams and TriBeams) allowed for integration of sample surface preparation techniques, i.e., site specific (cross-sections, serial sections, thin lamellas, micro- and nano-pillars, etc.), and large areas (cross-sections and surface polishing), and beam excited signal detection/quantification methods, i.e., EBSD, EDS, WDS, SIMS, Raman, LIBS, etc. This paper attempts to bring closer the current state-of-the-art of focussed beams systems for use in EBSD technique in Materials Science.