Feb 24 2009
CEMMNT is pleased to announce that it has recently upgraded its Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM) with a Gatan Tridiem ER energy loss filter (GIF).
TEM and Gatan filter provide a wealth of information about materials' properties, including sample thickness, elemental and chemical composition, electronic structure and energy levels, frequency-dependent dielectric response, and element-specific radial distribution of atoms
The GIF system enhances the stand-alone TEM's performance, offering significant benefits, such as improved image contrast and resolution of even very thick TEM specimens, quantitative analysis of chemical structure including light elements, and elemental imaging to nm resolution.
Enhanced Image Quality
GIF allows the TEM to work in an EFTEM (energy filter transmission microscope) mode, which removes inelasticity-scattered electrons resulting in images with better resolution and contrast.
The figures below illustrate two high-resolution TEM images of carbon nanotubes. On the left, the filtered image (TEM + GIF), with a clear improvement in contrast and image quality, whilst on the right is a more diffuse image from a 'stand-alone' TEM.
Chemical Analysis
GIF extends the capabilities of TEM into the realm of electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS) enabling the quantitative analysis of chemical structure. In the EELS mode, analysis of the energy distribution of inelastically-scattered electrons provides useful information about the electronic structure of the specimen atoms, their bonding, distribution of near neighbour atoms and their dielectric response.
Elemental Imaging
EFTEM enables multiple images of different energy levels to be captures and superimposed to produce a quantitative elemental map of the sample with nanometre resolution.