Abstract
Low Energy Electron Microscopy (LEEM), and its close cousin Photo Electron Emission Microscopy (PEEM) have evolved from curiosities in the hands of physicists, to powerful tools for dynamic materials analysis. Invented in 1962, and first successfully realized in 1985, there are about 30 combined LEEM/PEEM instruments in the world today, in addition to about an equal number of PEEM-only instruments. Most of these instruments follow a design that is now almost 20 years old. The most advanced instruments are located at synchrotron radiation facilities, but they are relatively few in number, and not readily available to the general user. In the meantime, the field of electron microscopy is undergoing revolutionary advances fueled by dual breakthroughs in electron energy filtering and aberration correction. Similarly, the field of quantum optics is developing ever more powerful light sources in the Vacuum Ultra Violet (VUV) and soft X-ray ranges that do not depend on massive investments in national infrastructure (i.e. synchrotrons), but deliver their photons in a standard laboratory. These advances from two very different fields will combine to set the stage for the development of LEEM and PEEM over the next decade. Aberration correction will improve LEEM resolution from 5–10 nm today, to 1.5–2 nm in the near future, enough to resolve individual unit cells in the famous Si(111)-(7×7) surface, or -probably more important- sufficient to resolve the structure of nanoscale features such as magnetic domain walls. In PEEM the spatial resolution will improve from ∼ 20 nm today to 4–5 nm, while at the same time improving transmission by a factor ∼10. Energy filtering, today mostly used by synchrotron-based instruments, will be ubiquitous, powerful, simple, and relatively inexpensive.
Published Version
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