[NanoIC topic] Advanced material analysis - nuclear reaction analysis (NRA) depth profiling at the Van de Graaff accelerator through automating the voltage control with LabView.

New materials and processes are investigated in the high-tech cleanroom of imec. The goal is to improve the performance of the future generations of processors, interconnect, and memory devices. To characterize the nanometer scale components, imec uses amongst others ion beam analysis methods [1]. A beam of highly energetic ions is generated by using an electrostatic Van de Graaff particle accelerator reaching up to more than 2 million volts [2]. With this machine, researchers investigate the interaction between the energetic ions and the novel semiconducting materials to deduce properties of the novel devices at the sub-nanometer scale.

The team at imec has modernized and improved the setup in recent years. It now offers very good voltage stability of the accelerator thanks to a LabView-based feed-back loop system. The imec system is equipped with a high-vacuum beamline and a recent multi-detector data-acquisition system using CAEN digitizers. At present, the accelerator voltage stabilization system and the materials analysis data-acquisition system run independently. The two software packages run on different computers and are not interconnected.

In this project, we aim to interconnect the accelerator voltage stabilization software and the data-acquisition software. This will be realized by building REST APIs using LabView Web services. As a result, it will be possible to schedule a series of measurements for which the data-acquisition software requests for a specific voltage, adjusts the necessary magnetic field, and subsequently coordinates the acquisition of a Rutherford backscattering (RBS) or a Nuclear Reaction Analysis (NRA) spectrum. This will enable a completely new type of analysis.

You will learn to work in LabView. You will establish the communication between the computer for data acquisition and the computer for data acquisition which uses Python. With this you will pioneer acquiring NRA and RBS spectra automatically in combination with the scanning of the accelerator voltage.