TEAM 0.5, installed at the Department of Energy’s National Center of Electron Microscopy (NCEM) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, can produce images with half-angstrom resolution, which is less than the diameter of a single hydrogen atom. That makes it the world’s most powerful transmission electron microscope. To achieve such an incredible resolution, TEAM 0.5 incorporated advanced technologies like ultra-stable electronics, improved aberration correctors, and an extremely bright electron source. Spherical aberration degrades images, making points of light look like disks, and correcting it can make dramatic improvements to image resolution, which provide broad-beam, wide-angle images, and easy scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM).
It can manage high resolution even with lower electron beam energies. It focuses the electrons present in the beam at the same plane, and the image contrast and signal-to-noise ratio improve tremendously. It snaps the images from different angles, which can be put into 3-D and can be analyzed to ones wish. It is scheduled for installation in the next phase of the TEAM Project at NCEM early in 2009. Further, researchers are looking to improve the chromatic aberration, which sounds a bit difficult, but certainly possible.
Via: ScienceCodex
