Bio-imaging with the helium-ion microscope: A review

• Matthias Schmidt,
• James M. Byrne and
• Ilari J. Maasilta

Beilstein J. Nanotechnol. 2021, 12, 1–23, doi:10.3762/bjnano.12.1

• imaging of biological specimens. We also discuss some technical features of this unique type of instrument and highlight some of the new advances which will likely become more widely used in the years to come. Keywords: bio-imaging; flood gun; helium-ion microscopy; high resolution; HIM; HIM-SIMS

• published in 2018 by Sato et al., who used the ionoluminescense generated by the He ion beam to detect ZnO nanoparticles which were incubated with COS7 cells [25]. Today HIM-SIMS is possible via two different approaches. The first, a sector-field mass-spectrometer SIMS, was developed by Dowsett, Wirtz, et

• HIM-SIMS was published by Lovric et al., who investigated E.coli bacteria exposed to TiO2 nanoparticles using the sector-field SIMS spectrometer [36]. In this review article, we build upon previous articles by Kim [37] and Gölzhäuser and Hlawacek [38] to present an overview on past discoveries and

Helium ion microscope – secondary ion mass spectrometry for geological materials

• Matthew R. Ball,
• Richard J. M. Taylor,
• Joshua F. Einsle,
• Fouzia Khanom,
• Christelle Guillermier and
• Richard J. Harrison

Beilstein J. Nanotechnol. 2020, 11, 1504–1515, doi:10.3762/bjnano.11.133

• well as practicalities for geological sample analyses of Li alongside a discussion of potential geological use cases of the HIM–SIMS instrument. Keywords: geoscience; helium ion microscopy (HIM); lithium; secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS); Introduction The helium ion microscope (HIM) is a

• . This combined HIM–SIMS instrument has intriguing possibilities for geological materials as, unlike previous SIMS techniques limited by the probe size of the primary beam, the small beam size theoretically allows for chemical mapping at high sensitivity with the spatial resolution controlled only by

• nm for O− with a beam current below 10 pA [13]. However, the scale of some inclusions within some planetary materials can be of the order of hundreds of nanometres, making detailed imaging of such inclusions with the NanoSIMS unfeasible. The HIM–SIMS however, with spatial resolutions of less than 10