Aberration-corrected STEM/TEM imaging at 15kV.
The performance of aberration-corrected (scanning) transmission electron microscopy (S/TEM) at an accelerating voltage of 15kV was evaluated in a low-voltage microscope equipped with a cold-field emission gun and a higher-order aberration corrector. Aberrations up to the fifth order were corrected by the aberration measurement and auto-correction system using the diffractogram tableau method in TEM and Ronchigram analysis in STEM. TEM observation of nanometer-sized particles demonstrated that aberrations up to an angle of 50mrad were compensated. A TEM image of Si[110] exhibited lattice fringes with a spacing of 0.192nm, and the power spectrum of the image showed spots corresponding to distances of 0.111nm. An annular dark-field STEM image of Si[110] showed lattice fringes of (111) and (22¯0) planes corresponding to lattice distances of 0.314nm and 0.192nm, respectively. At an accelerating voltage of 15kV, the developed low-voltage microscope achieved atomic-resolution imaging with a small chromatic aberration and a large uniform phase.
EM Business Unit, JEOL Ltd., 3-1-2 Musashino, Akishima, Tokyo 196-8558, Japan. Electronic address: tasasaki@jeol.co.jp.
Takeo
T
Sasaki
EM Business Unit, JEOL Ltd., 3-1-2 Musashino, Akishima, Tokyo 196-8558, Japan.
Hidetaka
H
Sawada
EM Business Unit, JEOL Ltd., 3-1-2 Musashino, Akishima, Tokyo 196-8558, Japan.
Fumio
F
Hosokawa
Nanotube Research Center, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Tsukuba Central 5, Higashi 1-1-1, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8565, Japan.
Yuta
Y
Sato
Nanotube Research Center, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Tsukuba Central 5, Higashi 1-1-1, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8565, Japan.
Kazu
K
Suenaga
Aberration correction; Low-voltage electron microscopy; Scanning transmission electron microscopy; Transmission electron microscopy