Low-Dose Imaging Techniques for Transmission Electron Microscopy

Abstract

A typical commercial transmission electron microscope (TEM) costsabout 5 for each electron volt (eV) of energy in the beam and, ifyou add on all available options, it can easily cost up to 10 pereV. As you’ll see, we use beam energies in the range from 100,000to 400,000 eV, so a TEMis an extremely expensive piece of equipment.Consequently, there have to be very sound scientific reasons forinvesting such a large amount of money in onemicroscope. In thischapter (which is just a brief overview of many of the concepts thatwe’ll talk about in detail throughout the book) we start by introducingyou to some of the historical development of the TEM because thehistory is intertwined with some of the reasons why you need to usea TEM to characterize materials. Other reasons for using a TEM haveappeared as the instrument continues to develop, to the point whereit can seriously be claimed that no other scientific instrument existswhich can offer such a broad range of characterization techniqueswith such high spatial and analytical resolution, coupled with acompletely quantitative understanding of the various techniques.