A Photonic Atom Probe Allowing for Super-Resolution Photoluminescence Spectroscopy and Contactless Optical Piezo-Spectroscopy

The laser pulses controlling the ion evaporation in Laser-assisted Atom Probe Tomography (La-APT) can simultaneously excite photoluminescence in semiconductor or insulating specimens [1]. An atom probe equipped with approriate focalization and collection optics can thus be coupled with an in-situ micro-photoluminescence (μPL) bench [2] that can be operated even during APT analysis. Our team has recently developed a coupled μPL-APT instrument operating at 400 kHz, controlled by 150 fs laser pulses tunable in energy in a large spectral range (spanning from deep UV to near IR). Micro-PL spectroscopy is performed using a 320 mm focal length spectrometer equipped with a CCD camera for time-integrated and with a streak camera for time-resolved acquisitions. Such a Photonic Atom Probe (PAP) has been applied to the study of the optical properties of nanoscale emitters in an in-situ correlative microscopy approach. The evolution of the PL signal during the APT analysis is an original source of information. In this work we analyzed specimens containing ZnO/(Mg,Zn)O quantum wells (QWs) of different thicknesses, and we show that it is possible to distinguish the optical signatures of separate QWs distant as few as 20 nm – well below the diffraction limit of the laser [3]. This information is then correlated with the chemical 3D distribution obtained by APT. The analysis of the PL spectral shifts during the APT analysis also allows determining the stress state induced by the electrostatic field [4].