Method and apparatus for automatically correcting a charged-particle beam and method of controlling an aberration corrector for a charged-particle beam

摘要

There is disclosed a method and apparatus for automatically correcting a charged-particle beam (2) with an aberration corrector (6) without the operator performing manual operations. The apparatus has an extraction portion (11b) for extracting the profile (13) of the beam from images of a surface of a sample (5), a calculation unit (11c) for calculating the amount of axial deviation of the apparatus from the position of the extracted profile of the beam, and a feedback unit (11d) for automatically applying feedback to the aberration corrector or to the objective lens (4) according to the calculated amount of axial deviation.