Electron microscope attains 50-picometer resolution Available to Purchase

Ultimately, the resolution of an electron microscope is limited by the electron’s de Broglie wavelength. For the 300-keV electrons typical in scanning transmission electron microscopy, that limit is about 2 pm, or 1/25th of the radius of hydrogen’s 1s orbital. But STEM images are formed by focusing a billion or so electrons per second onto a sample. The spherical aberration of the electromagnetic lenses and the finite size of the electron source cause the electrons to lose phase coherence, lowering the resolution to about 100 pm, or about twice the distance between atoms in many crystals. Now, a team from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California has halved the STEM resolution limit to 50 pm. The boost in performance comes from two novel components: an electron source that emits copious electrons from a region just 25 pm across and a hexapole corrector that can compensate for phase aberrations up...