Continuous-Time Modeling and Analysis of Particle Beam Metrology

Particle beam microscopy (PBM) performs nanoscale imaging by pixelwise capture of scalar values representing noisy measurements the response from secondary electrons (SEs) integrated over a dwell time. Extended to metrology, goals include estimating SE yield at each pixel and detecting differences in across pixels; obstacles shot noise particle source as well lack knowledge variability instrument single SEs. A recently introduced time-resolved measurement paradigm promises mitigation noise, but its analysis development have been largely limited estimation problems under an idealization which bursts are directly perfectly counted. Here, analyses extended error exponents feature detection degraded that representative actual behavior for problems. For idealized counts, insights on existing estimators superior estimator also provided. realistic PBM scenario, extensions model introduced, methods parameter extraction discussed, large improvements data presented.