Hitachi Builds World's Most Powerful TEM

A team of scientists at Hitachi's Advanced Research Lab (Hatoyama, Japan), working in collaboration with the Japan Science and Technology Corp., has built what the company is calling the most powerful transmission electron microscope (TEM) in the world. The new "field-emission" TEM uses 1 million volts of electricity to accelerate electrons toward a sample, producing a beam of electron waves with an intensity (or brightness) four times greater than the best previous TEM and 1,000 times greater than conventional thermionic-emission TEMs.

The new microscope requires a steady of approximately 1 million volts with a stability of half a volt, and the electron source must be steady to within 0.5 nm. The TEM can make out rows of atoms only .5 angstroms apart, rivaling scanning tunneling microscopes. It is also capable of taking 60 pictures per second (the same rate as TV), which was fast enough to allow researchers to make movies of fine gold particles changing their shapes.

According to Hitachi's Takeshi Kawasaki, the microscope will be useful for observing certain dynamic properties of condensed matter systems, for example the movement of vortices in high-temperature superconductors.

For more information, contact Takeshi Kawasaki of Hitachi at +81-492-96-6111 or tkawa@harl.hitachi.co.jp.

Edited by Jim Pomager