Limits to Spatial Resolution in the HRTEM

Abstract The resolution of the high-resolution transmission electron microscope is limited by the specimen as well as by the HRTEM. For specimens that beam-damage, image resolution depends upon electron energy and electron dose. For small-cell crystalline specimens, Bragg’s law quantizes allowable reso-lutions, preventing image resolution from reaching instrumental resolutiqn. Specimen thickness be-comes increasingly important at higher resolutions. For a resolution of d(Å), we need the specimen to diffract at u=1/d. Consideration of the intersection of the Ewald sphere with the specimen shape trans-form (fig. 1) shows that thickness must be less than For a resolution pr 1.0A at 300keV, thickness must be less than 100A; to achieve 0.7A requires halving this value to 50A (fig.l). Resolution in an image depends on the spatial frequencies of the information (diffracted waves) trans-ferred from the amplitude spectrum (specimen exit-surface wavefunction) into the image intensity spec-trum (Fourier transform of the image intensity).