Aberration-Coreected Electron Microscopy at Brookhaven National Laboratory

The last decade witnessed the rapid development and implementation of aberration correction in electron optics, realizing a more-than-70-year-old dream of aberration-free electron microscopy with a spatial resolution below one angstrom [1-9]. With sophisticated aberration correctors, modern electron microscopes now can reveal local structural information unavailable with neutrons and x-rays, such as the local arrangement of atoms, order/disorder, electronic inhomogeneity, bonding states, spin configuration, quantum confinement, and symmetry breaking [10-17]. Aberration correction through multipole-based correctors, as well as the associated improved stability in accelerating voltage, lens supplies, and goniometers in electron microscopes now enables medium-voltage (200-300kV) microscopes to achieve image resolution at or below 0.1nm. Aberration correction not only improves the instrument's spatial resolution but, equally importantly, allows larger objective lens pole-piece gaps to be employed thus realizing the potential of the instrument as a nanoscale property-measurement tool. That is, while retaining high spatial resolution, we can use various sample stages to observe the materials response under various temperature, electric- and magnetic- fields, and atmospheric environments. Such capabilities afford tremendous opportunities to tackle challenging science and technology issues in physics, chemistry, materials science, and biology. The research goal of the electron microscopy group at the Dept. of Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science and the Center for Functional Nanomaterials, as well as the Institute for Advanced Electron Microscopy, Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), is to elucidate the microscopic origin of the physical- and chemical-behavior of materials, and the role of individual, or groups of atoms, especially in their native functional environments. We plan to accomplish this by developing and implementing various quantitative electron microscopy techniques in strongly correlated electron systems and nanostructured materials. As a first step, with the support of Materials Science Division, Office of Basic Energy Science, US Department of Energy, and the New York State Office of Science, Technology, and Academic Research, recently we acquired three aberration-corrected electron microscopes from the three major microscope manufacturers, i.e., JEOL, Hitachi, and FEI. The Hitachi HD2700C is equipped with a probe corrector, the FEI Titan 80-300 has an imaging corrector, while the JEOL2200MCO has both. All the correctors are of the dual-hexapole type, designed and manufactured by CEOS GmbH based on the design due to Rose and Haider [3, 18]. All these three are one-of-a-kind in the US, designed for specialized capabilities in characterizing nanoscale structure. In this chapter, we review the performance of these state-of-the art instruments and the new challenges associated with the improved spatial resolution, including the environment requirements of the laboratory that hosts these instruments. Although each instrument we describe here has its own strengths and drawbacks, it is not our intention to rank them in terms of their performance, especially their spatial resolution in imaging.