Next-generation detectors will provide new insights for nanoscale materials science
DOI: 10.1063/10.0002666
Next-generation detectors will provide new insights for nanoscale materials science lead image
Scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) has become a go-to technique for characterizing cutting-edge materials on the nanoscale. Recent improvements in detector technology and their use in STEM allow a better understanding of the structures of materials and heterostructures.
MacLaren et al. reviewed the development and future directions for imaging detectors for use in scanning transmission electron microscopy. The review highlights the technology’s improving efficiency. With a high enough frame rate, the detector-based systems can capture the entire back focal plane for each pixel in a single scan, and produce a dataset that can be processed to reveal myriad types of information about the sample with atomic or nanometer resolution. This includes magnetization, point defect and light atom location, strain, and 3D atomic ordering.
“We are really hopeful that imaging using such detectors is going to revolutionize nanoscience in the next decade,” said author Ian MacLaren.
The flexibility and higher sensitivity that these detectors provide may allow themselves to be used in areas of research previously underexplored by STEM. There are now good prospects, for example, of imaging crystallography or ordering in pharmaceuticals and biological systems, which are particularly sensitive to electron beams.
Current-generation detectors generally require roughly one millisecond to record each pixel. MacLaren hopes future developments will push readouts down by several orders of magnitude to minimize problems with image distortions due to environmental instability.
“Moreover, in the next decade, we’ll start to see that these advances in detectors will percolate increasingly into electron energy loss spectroscopy,” said MacLaren.
Source: “Detectors - The ongoing revolution in scanning transmission electron microscopy and why this important to materials characterisation,” by Ian MacLaren, Thomas A. Macgregor, Christopher S. Allen, and Angus I. Kirkland, APL Materials (2020). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0026992 .
