Published in Ultramicroscopy
The direct contact between tip and sample in atomic force microscopy (AFM) leads to demand for a quantitative knowledge of the AFM tip apex geometry in high-resolution AFM imaging and many other types of AFM applications like force measurements and surface roughness measurements. Given, the AFM tip apex may change continuously during measurements d...
Published in Ultramicroscopy
Field evaporation studies of crystalline Si were performed in a three-dimensional atom-probe, which utilized a local electrode geometry. Several distinct phenomena were observed. Si field evaporation rates showed: (1) no measurable dependence on temperature below 110K, (2) an exponential dependence on evaporation rate as a function of temperature ...
Published in Ultramicroscopy
Electron channelling occurs when the incident electron beam is parallel to the atom columns of an object, such as a crystal or a particular crystal defect. Then, the electrons are trapped in the electrostatic potential of an atom column in which they scatter dynamically. This picture provides physical insight and explains why a one-to-one correspon...
Published in Ultramicroscopy
Techniques for the rapid preparation of atom-probe samples extracted directly from a Si wafer are presented and discussed. A systematic mounting process to a standardized microtip array allows approximately 12 samples to be extracted from a near-surface region and mounted for subsequent focused-ion-beam sharpening in a short period of time, about 2...
Published in Ultramicroscopy
Although recent years have seen significant advances in the spatial resolution possible in the transmission electron microscope (TEM), the temporal resolution of most microscopes is limited to video rate at best. This lack of temporal resolution means that our understanding of dynamic processes in materials is extremely limited. High temporal resol...
Published in Ultramicroscopy
In a previous study, it was reported that the possible space groups of a crystal can be identified at a microscopic or nanoscopic scale, thanks to microdiffraction patterns obtained with a nearly parallel electron incident beam focused on a very small area of the specimen. A systematic method was proposed, which consists of the observation of a few...
Published in Ultramicroscopy
The application of electron crystallography to the study of organic materials is reviewed, mainly in context of the author's own experience. Direct methods for crystallographic phase determination have been shown to be very effective for ab initio structure analyses with electron diffraction intensities, permitting the elucidation of previously unc...
Published in Ultramicroscopy
The ultimate aim of electron diffraction data collection for structure analysis is to sample the reciprocal space as accurately as possible to obtain a high-quality data set for crystal structure determination. Besides a more precise lattice parameter determination, fine sampling is expected to deliver superior data on reflection intensities, which...
Published in Ultramicroscopy
A 2-beam model is used to simulate precession electron diffraction (PED) intensities. It is shown that this model can be inverted with minimal knowledge of the underlying crystal structure, permitting structure factor amplitudes to be deduced directly from measured intensities within the 2-beam approximation. This approach may be used in conjunctio...
Published in Ultramicroscopy
Aiming to determine the contrast mismatch factor i.e. the Stobbs factor between the experimental and simulated high-resolution transmission electron micrographs, we have systematically compared the experimental images and simulations of a cleaved silicon sample for a series of focal settings and specimen thicknesses. For zero-loss energy filtered i...
