page_title: Transmission electron microscopy
section_title: Diffraction contrast
hierarchical_section_title: Transmission electron microscopy / Imaging methods / Contrast formation / Diffraction contrast
caption_attribution_description: TEM Micrograph of Dislocations 1 (precipitate and dislocations in austenitic stainless steel) Photomicrograph by Wikityke
context_page_description: Transmission electron microscopy is a microscopy technique in which a beam of electrons is transmitted through a specimen to form an image. The specimen is most often an ultrathin section less than 100 nm thick or a suspension on a grid. An image is formed from the interaction of the electrons with the sample as the beam is transmitted through the specimen. The image is then magnified and focused onto an imaging device, such as a fluorescent screen, a layer of photographic film, or a sensor such as a scintillator attached to a charge-coupled device.
  Transmission electron microscopes are capable of imaging at a significantly higher resolution than light microscopes, owing to the smaller de Broglie wavelength of electrons. This enables the instrument to capture fine detail—even as small as a single column of atoms, which is thousands of times smaller than a resolvable object seen in a light microscope. Transmission electron microscopy is a major analytical method in the physical, chemical and biological sciences.
context_section_description: Samples can exhibit diffraction contrast, whereby the electron beam undergoes Bragg scattering, which in the case of a crystalline sample, disperses electrons into discrete locations in the back focal plane. By the placement of apertures in the back focal plane, i.e. the objective aperture, the desired Bragg reflections can be selected (or excluded), thus only parts of the sample that are causing the electrons to scatter to the selected reflections will end up projected onto the imaging apparatus.
  If the reflections that are selected do not include the unscattered beam (which will appear up at the focal point of the lens), then the image will appear dark wherever no sample scattering to the selected peak is present, as such a region without a specimen will appear dark. This is known as a dark-field image.
  Modern TEMs are often equipped with specimen holders that allow the user to tilt the specimen to a range of angles in order to obtain specific diffraction conditions, and apertures placed above the specimen allow the user to select electrons that would otherwise be diffracted in a particular direction from entering the specimen.
  Applications for this method include the identification of lattice defects in crystals. By carefully selecting the orientation of the sample, it is possible not just to determine the position of defects but also to determine the type of defect present. If the sample is oriented so that one particular plane is only slightly tilted away from the strongest diffracting angle (known as the Bragg Angle), any distortion of the crystal plane that locally tilts the plane to the Bragg angle will produce particularly strong contrast variations. However, defects that produce only displacement of atoms that do not tilt the crystal to the Bragg angle (i. e. displacements parallel to the crystal plane) will not produce strong contrast.
caption: Transmission electron micrograph of dislocations in steel, which are faults in the structure of the crystal lattice at the atomic scale
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