Abstract
Electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS) in the electron microscope has progressed remarkably in the last five years. Advances in monochromator and spectrometer design have improved the energy resolution attainable in a scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) to 4.2 meV, and new applications of ultrahigh energy resolution EELS have not lagged behind. They include vibrational spectroscopy in the electron microscope, a field that did not exist 5 years ago but has now grown very substantially. Notable examples include vibrational mapping with about 1 nm spatial resolution, analyzing the momentum dependence of vibrational states in very small volumes, determining the local temperature of the sample from the ratio of energy gains to energy losses, detecting hydrogen and analyzing its bonding, probing radiation-sensitive materials with minimized damage by aloof spectroscopy and leap-frog scanning, and identifying biological molecules with different isotopic substitutions. We review the instrumentation advances, provide a summary of key applications, and chart likely future directions.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 60-67 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | Ultramicroscopy |
| Volume | 203 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Aug 2019 |
Funding
Partial support for developing the Nion Iris spectrometer was provided by DOE grant DE-SC0007694. J.A.H. and J.C.I. were supported by the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, which is a Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility, and the research was partly conducted using instrumentation within ORNL's Materials Characterization Core provided by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy. We are grateful to our colleagues at Nion Co., particularly to Petr Hrncirik, Dimitry Kudlay, Gwyn Skone and Zoltan Szilagyi for help with hardware, electronics and software, as well as bringing up and running the instruments. Special thanks are also due to Ray Carpenter, Phil Batson, Mathieu Kociak and Odile Stephan, whose help in launching the ultrahigh energy resolution EELS project at Nion has been invaluable, and to Mick Brown, Archie Howie, Peter Rez, Mike Walls and several others for enlightening discussions and encouragement. Partial support for developing the Nion Iris spectrometer was provided by DOE grant DE-SC0007694. J.A.H. and J.C.I. were supported by the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, which is a Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility, and the research was partly conducted using instrumentation within ORNL's Materials Characterization Core provided by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy. We are grateful to our colleagues at Nion Co. particularly to Petr Hrncirik, Dimitry Kudlay, Gwyn Skone and Zoltan Szilagyi for help with hardware, electronics and software, as well as bringing up and running the instruments. Special thanks are also due to Ray Carpenter, Phil Batson, Mathieu Kociak and Odile Stephan, whose help in launching the ultrahigh energy resolution EELS project at Nion has been invaluable, and to Mick Brown, Archie Howie, Peter Rez, Mike Walls and several others for enlightening discussions and encouragement. O.L. Krivanek, N. Dellby, M.T. Hotz, B. Plotkin-Swing, N.J. Bacon, A.L. Bleloch, G.J. Corbin, M.V. Hoffman, C.E. Meyer and T.C. Lovejoy are employees and/or officers of Nion Co. and have a financial interest in Nion.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences | |
| Department of Energy Office of Science | |
| UT-Battelle, LLC | |
| U.S. Department of Energy | DE-SC0007694 |
| U.S. Department of Energy | |
| UT-Battelle | DE-AC05-00OR22725 |
| UT-Battelle |