F. Beone, L. Capodieci, A. Mariano, M. Palmisano, E. Pesce, M. Re

Motivations

REMOTE LAB: an example with Helium Ion Microscope

collaboration UTICT-UTTMATBangelo.mariano@enea.it

• Share in real time research activities and their results• Enable interaction with remote user during experiments• Handle demo remote sessions• Handle experimental lessons with a large number of students• Handle joint experimentation with domain experts or customers

all over the world • Avoid interference with workstation and its microscope

Scanning Helium Ion Microscopy

This is a new imaging technology based on a scanning helium ion beam, that has several advantages over the traditional scanning electron microscope. Due to the very high source brightness and the short De Broglie wavelength of the helium ions, it is possible to obtain qualitative data not achievable with conventional microscopes which use photons or electrons for the beam. As the helium ion beam interacts with the sample, it does not suffer from a large excitation volume, and hence provides sharp images on a wide range of materials. The detectors provide images which offer topographic, material, crystallographic, and electrical properties of the sample. In contrast to other ion beams, there is no discernible sample damage due to relatively light mass of the helium ion.

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Typical results

Surface detail of a Basalt fiber

Surface morphology of a ZnO sample

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Legend

1. Helium Ion Microscope. It is located at the Brindisi ENEA Research Center and it is one of the most important research facilities of this type in Europe.

2. Microscope Workstation. It has the role of managing the microscope and of showing the experiment results.

3. Network Camera. It captures video from laboratory during experiments and send it to the Local Area Network.

4. Network Frame Grabber. It splits the video signal coming from the workstation video card and send it to the local Area Network. It takes as input the workstation video signal and as output a video signal for workstation monitor and a video signal for ethernet connected cards

5. Microphone. It captures audio from laboratory during experiments, in order to make easy communication with remote users and send it to the frontend PC.

6. Frontend PC. It manages communication between microscope lab and external world. It takes as input the video signal from the network frame grabber - to show research content - the video signal from the network camera – to show research environment – the audio signal from microphone – to let researchers communicate – and then sends them to a web conferencing platform over the internet.

7. Remote Users. They are end users of a remote lab. They can login with their credentials to a web conferencing platform and they can follow research activities remotely, interacting with researchers at the Helium Ion Microscope. Any device is enabled and very large audiences can be involved in experiments that otherwise would be very difficult to spread outside the lab

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