The effect of surface contamination in SEM fractographic investigations

Penetration effect at sharp edges in the scanning electron microscope

“…A very impressive demonstration of the improvement in image quality that can be obtained when exa-* Dedicated to Prof. Gerhard Pfefferkorn on the occasion of his 65th birthday mining a metallurgical fracture sample by reducing the incident beam energy from 20 ke V to 5 ke V was published by Pickwick and Smith (1972). Unfortunately, the beam diameter tends to get larger as the accelerating potential is reduced.…”