Mechanical Precision Preparation of Atom Probe Tips

The ongoing trend towards engineering materials on a nano-level demands material characterization at the atomic level. For metals, semiconductors and ceramics, atom probe tomography (APT) is a frequently used technique. For many studies, however, much of the effort goes into liberating the region that will later comprise the APT tip from its surroundings or simply picking a region within a material. Precision mechanical grinding, originally developed for micron scaled tensile specimens