Advances in gas-mediated electron beam-induced etching and related material processing techniques

Electron beam-induced etching (EBIE) has traditionally been used for top-down, direct-write, chemical dry etching, and iterative editing of materials. The present article reviews recent advances in EBIE modeling and emerging applications, with an emphasis on use cases in which the approaches that have conventionally been used to realize EBIE are instead used for material analysis, surface functionalization, or bottom-up growth of nanostructured materials. Such applications are used to highlight the shortcomings of existing quantitative EBIE models and to identify physicochemical phenomena that must be accounted for in order to enable full exploitation and predictive modeling of EBIE and related electron beam fabrication techniques.