The development of field-emission scanning electron microcopy for imaging biological surfaces

摘要

This article traces the important milestones in the development of high-resolution, field-emission, scanning electron microscopes (SEM). Such instruments are now capa- ble of producing images of the surfaces of biological spci- mens that rival, in terms of resolution and contrast, those pro- duced by conventional transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Even though one of the first instruments to produce a useful transmission electron microscope image was, in fact, an early scanning microscope, TEM reached its full potential for biological imaging almost 30 years sooner than did SEM.