Abstract
Electron energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS) has been investigated in the range from 2 to >10 keV using an optimized optical coupling of the microscope to the spectrometer to improve the high loss performance in EELS. It is found that excellent quality data can now be acquired up until about 5 keV, suitable for both energy loss near edge structure (ELNES) studies of oxidation and local chemistry, and potentially useful for extended energy loss fine structure (EXELFS) studies of local atomic ordering. Examples studied included oxidation in Zr, Mo and Sn, and the ELNES and EXELFS of the Ti-K edge. It is also shown that good quality electron energy-loss spectroscopy can even be performed for losses above 9.2 keV, the energy loss at which the collection angle becomes 'infinite', and this is demonstrated using the tungsten L3 edge at about 10.2 keV.
Highlights
It was the vision of Mick Brown, in the hundredth year after the discovery of the electron, to build a ‘synchrotron in a microscope’ [1]
It is found that excellent quality data can be acquired up until about 5 keV, suitable for both energy loss near edge structure (ELNES) studies of oxidation and local chemistry, and potentially useful for extended energy loss fine structure (EXELFS) studies of local atomic ordering
In our previous work [9], we showed that one benefit of the improved optical coupling to the spectrometer was that the continuum background was better behaved above 2 keV loss
Summary
It was the vision of Mick Brown, in the hundredth year after the discovery of the electron, to build a ‘synchrotron in a microscope’ [1]. Key to his vision was that it should be possible to do many of the things hitherto only performed at synchrotrons using a modern analytical scanning transmission electron microscope. One of the key features of this idea was the understanding that electron energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS) and X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) provide comparable information and probe the same key information – the unoccupied density of states in a material. There have been very few studies with direct comparisons between XAS and EELS on exactly the same edges (Hug et al [2] compared EELS and XAS for Al-K at ~1.5 keV and Vlachos et al [3] did the same on the O-K edge at ~0.53 keV)
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