Three Dimensional Energy Filtered Transmission Electron Microscopy (3D-EFTEM)

Abstract Energy filtered transmission electron microscopy (EFTEM) has been developed in recent years to be a highly flexible tool for spatially resolved microanalysis. The basic technique has been extended to allow fully quantitative mapping of single elements, or a large range of elements using an image-spectroscopy approach. All these techniques are still limited by the nature of the TEM as a structure projector; any elemental map is only a 2D projection of what is in reality a 3D structure. A fully 3D approach to EFTEM analysis would offer additional insights into many materials problems and make possible meaningful analysis of certain systems for the first time. Three-dimensional electron microscopy (electron tomography) offers one path for the reconstruction of 3D structures from 2D projections. Although this has been well developed for solving the structure of biological macromolecules and viruses its use in the physical sciences is quite new.