The Recent Technologies on Transmission Electron Microscopes

摘要

Electron microscopes have been playing leading roles in recent development of nano-technologies. Among various microscopes, transmission electron microscopes (TEM) in particular have unique characteristics and capabilities which include atomic order of resolution, analysis from localized nano-areas, etc. In this article, we report recent trends of hardware and software associated with TEMs. In response to materials science applications, higher voltage microscopes such as 300 kV TEMs have been made available. These TEMs will be standard instruments for transmission electron microscopy for materials science in the future. Analytical functions including EDX, EELS, etc. have been significantly improved over the years both in hardware and software. With the development of field emission (FE) electron sources for TEMs analytical performance has been greatly improved. For specimen preparation, FIB systems have been successfully applied for transmission electron microscopy. Many materials which have been difficult with conventional techniques can now be prepared and examined using TEMs mach more efficiently than in the past. In this article, we have shown some typical applications for related with corrosion engineering.