New approaches to characterizing advanced materials

Abstract

Motivations for using the electron microscope are obviously many and varied. For example, engineers in the semiconductor industry might be primarily interested in establishing reasons for device failure. Chemists in the petrochemical industry could be concerned with analyzing the composition and structure of novel catalytic materials. Many researchers seek to characterize microstructure and establish definitive connections with preparation conditions and/or some pertinent macroscopic behavior. Instrumentation for the high-resolution electron microscope (HREM) has continued to evolve to the extent that imaging on the atomic scale and microanalysis on the sub-nanometer scale are oftentimes available from the same microscope. Such instruments are thus highly attractive to all those people interested in characterizing advanced materials. Our purpose here is to provide a brief overview of some recent developments in instrumentation and techniques and to highlight their relevance for materials science applications.