Aberration correction past and present

Abstract

Electron lenses are extremely poor: if glass lenses were as bad, we should see as well with the naked eye as with a microscope! The demonstration by Otto Scherzer in 1936 that skillful lens design could never eliminate the spherical and chromatic aberrations of rotationally symmetric electron lenses was therefore most unwelcome and the other great electron optician of those years, Walter Glaser, never ceased striving to find a loophole in Scherzer's proof. In the wartime and early post-war years, the first proposals for correcting C(s) were made and in 1947, in a second milestone paper, Scherzer listed these and other ways of correcting lenses; soon after, Dennis Gabor invented holography for the same purpose. These approaches will be briefly summarized and the work that led to the successful implementation of quadupole-octopole and sextupole correctors in the 1990 s will be analysed. In conclusion, the elegant role of image algebra in describing image formation and processing and, above all, in developing new methods will be mentioned.