Abstract
This final report chronicles a three-year, Laboratory Directed Research
and Development (LDRD) project at Los Alamos National Laboratory
(LANL). The High-Resolution Electron Microscopy Facility has doubled
in size and tripled in quality since the beginning of the three-year
period. The facility now includes a field-emission scanning electron
microscope, a 100 kV field-emission scanning transmission electron
microscope (FE-STEM), a 300 kV field-emission high-resolution transmission
electron microscope (FE-HRTEM), and a 300 kV analytical transmission
electron microscope. A new orientation imaging microscope is being
installed. X-ray energy dispersive spectrometers for chemical analysis
are available on all four microscopes; parallel electron energy loss
spectrometers are operational on the FE-STEM and FE-HRTEM. These
systems enable evaluation of local atomic bonding, as well as chemical
composition in nanometer-scale regions. The FE-HRTEM has a point-to-point
resolution of 1.6 angstrom, but the resolution can be pushed to
its information limit of 1 angstrom by computer reconstruction
of a focal series of images. HRTEM has been used to image the atomic
structure of defects such as dislocations, grain boundaries, and
interfaces in a variety of materials from superconductors and ferroelectrics
to structural ceramics and intermetallics.
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