Mass thickness determination and microanalysis of thin films in the TEM—Revisited

Pebbles and PebbleJuggler: software for accurate, unbiased, and fast measurement and analysis of nanoparticle morphology from transmission electron microscopy (TEM) micrographs

“…The exponential form of transmittance has experimentally been shown to be valid for thicknesses and objective apertures matching those usually employed in TEM imaging of NPs. [9][10][11] Since different scattering processes are usually independent, the total incoherent transmittance is the product of the transmittances of each incoherent process…”

“…Within a ''thin film'' approximation, the elastic coherent scattering can be approximated by a quadratic model. Note that there is no difference between kinematical and dynamical diffraction in eqn (10) since it does not contain s eff any more. For typical NPs and TEM experimental conditions, the NP size is a non-negligible fraction of x g , and we again expect that the quadratic model is not a good approximation nor that it is completely wrong, except perhaps for NPs exactly diffracting at low-x g reflections.…”

“…These are outside our scope and would require much more refined theoretical treatment and instrumental protocol. [9][10][11][12] We just showed that, in our quest for the best compromise between accuracy and speed of the NP measurement process, simple polynomial models for NP transmittance have a theoretical basis in that they are suitable for very small (a few nanometers) NPs. What we will later show is that such simple models are effective in quickly and accurately recognizing and measuring images of NPs in the tens of nanometer scale notwithstanding that they are somewhat rough approximations of the NP transmittance.…”

“…8 Herein, the morphology refers to the projected two-dimensional (2D) shape of NPs seen in TEM micrographs. PEBBLES is intended for the frequent and tedious chore of measuring the morphology of a NP population and not for thickness measurement [9][10][11] nor reconstruction of the 3D shape. 12 After taking some medium-resolution TEM micrographs with the appropriate instrumental settings, one has to measure the morphology of many hundred NPs in order to achieve a significant description of the morphological characteristics of the NP population.…”

Electron energy-loss spectroscopy: A versatile tool for the investigations of plasmonic excitations

“…One of the major challenges in the application of EELS in transmission in solid-state physics and material science is the preparation of the samples. The mean free path of electrons in solids is limited due to a number of interactions, predominantly plasmon excitations [7,[42][43][44][45].…”