18th Microscopy of Semiconducting Materials Conference (MSM XVIII)

This volume contains invited and contributed papers from the 18th international conference on Microscopy of Semiconducting Materials held at St Catherine's College, University of Oxford, on 7–11 April 2013. The meeting was organised under the auspices of the Royal Microscopical Society and supported by the Institute of Physics as well as the Materials Research Society of the USA. This conference series deals with recent advances in semiconductor studies carried out by all forms of microscopy, with an emphasis on electron microscopy and scanning probe microscopy with high spatial resolution. This time the meeting was attended by 109 delegates from 17 countries world-wide. We were welcomed by Professor Sir Peter Hirsch, who noted that this was the first of these conferences where Professor Tony Cullis was unable to attend, owing to ill-health. During the meeting a card containing greetings from many of Tony's friends and colleagues was signed, and duly sent to Tony afterwards. As semiconductor devices shrink further new routes for device processing and characterisation need to be developed, and, for the latter, methods that offer sub-nanometre spatial resolution are particularly valuable. The various forms of imaging, diffraction and spectroscopy available in modern microscopes are powerful tools for studying the microstructure, electronic structure, chemistry and also electric fields in semiconducting materials. Recent advances in instrumentation, from lens aberration correction in both TEM and STEM instruments, to the development of a wide range of scanning probe techniques, as well as new methods of signal quantification have been presented at this conference. Two topics that have at this meeting again highlighted the interesting contributions of aberration corrected transmission electron microscopy were: contrast quantification of annular dark-field STEM images in terms of chemical composition (Z-contrast), sample thickness and strain, and the study of dislocation core structures at atomic resolution. Figure 1. Conference photo taken by JLH inside St Catherine's College Each of the 49 manuscripts submitted for publication in this proceedings volume has been independently reviewed, most by two reviewers, and revised where necessary before being accepted for publication. The Editors are grateful to the following colleagues for their rapid and careful reviewing of manuscripts: R Beanland, C B Boothroyd, P D Brown, D Cherns, A J Craven, K Durose, C J Humphre