Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 July 2020
The range of electrons for a given beam energy and atomic number is one of the most valuable piece of information a microscopist must know before carrying out qualitative and quantitative analysis of heterogeneous samples in a scanning electron microscope (SEM). The frequently used parametrization of Kanaya & Okayama is only « valid » at high energy (EO > 10 keV). However, with the advent of Field Emission Gun SEM (FEGSEM) most of the effort has been toward low energy analysis where no parametrization is available yet. In this paper, the parametrization of the range of electrons at low energy as a function of atomic number and beam energy will be presented for both the backscattered and the internal electrons.
The distribution of the maximum depth reached by 250 k electrons generated by the CASINO Monte Carlo program2 was used to compute the range for 10 elements at 20 energies.