Answer Show The history of the electron microscope dates back to early twentieth century when the first electromagnetic lens was developed. This opened the door of possibility to use the principles of the lens to invent a microscope that could examine the structure of samples with greater detail. This had the potential to exceed the capabilities of the optical microscope, which was the first type of microscope and only alternative option at the time. The term microscope is derived from the Greek works mikros and skopeo, which mean small and look at, respectively. Throughout the history of science, there has been a lasting interest in viewing the intricate details of the world in increasing magnifications. For example, in biology, this allows us to examine the appearance and structure or cells, bacteria, viruses, and other particles. In geology, this allows us to view complex details of rocks, minerals, and fossils, which can provide insight into the history and future of the planet where we live. Timeline of the electron microscope historyHans Busch invented the first electromagnetic lens in 1926 and, although he allegedly filed a patent for an electron microscope in 1928, he did not construct the microscope. It was Ernst Ruska and Max Knoll, a physicist and an electrical engineer, respectively, from the University of Berlin, who created the first electron microscope in 1931. This prototype was able to produce a magnification of four-hundred-power and was the first device to show what was possible with electron microscopy. In the same year, Reinhold Rudenberg, who was the scientific director of Siemens-Schuckertwerke acquired the electron microscope patent. In 1933, Ernst Ruska developed on the original model further to develop an electron microscope that was capable of producing an image of higher resolution than what was possible with optical microscopy. In 1937, Bodo von Borries and Helmut Ruska joined him to develop ways that the principles could be applied, such as to examine biological samples. In the same year, Manfred von Ardenne developed the first scanning electron microscope. Siemens-Schuckertwerke released the first commercial electron microscope to the public in 1938. From this point onwards, transmission electron microscopes became more readily available in other areas of the world, including North America. In 1986, Ernst Ruska was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of the electron microscope, in conjunction with Heinrich Rohrer and Gerd Binnig for the development of the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) The present and futureTransmission electron microscopes are now commonly used in scientific research to examine samples at a higher resolution and increase our understanding of the world around us. It is evident that the modern transmission electron microscopes are now capable of producing images of significantly higher magnification and resolution than the original models. However, the principles of the electron microscope are still based on the first prototype that was developed by Ernst Ruska. Electron microscopes have surpassed many of the limitations of optical microscopes, with improved resolution that makes it possible to view microscopic objects such as atoms. However, enhancements to the electron microscope continue to be made to this day. For example, an environmental-scanning electron microscope that maintains a low vacuum in the sample chamber to view specimen with moisture is currently under development. ReferencesLast updated Aug 23, 2018 Please use one of the following formats to cite this article in your essay, paper or report:
An electron microscope is a microscope that uses a beam of accelerated electrons as a source of illumination. As the wavelength of an electron can be up to 100,000 times shorter than that of visible light photons, electron microscopes have a higher resolving power than light microscopes and can reveal the structure of smaller objects. A scanning transmission electron microscope has achieved better than 50 pm resolution in annular dark-field imaging mode[1] and magnifications of up to about 10,000,000× whereas most light microscopes are limited by diffraction to about 200 nm resolution and useful magnifications below 2000×.
Electron microscopes use shaped magnetic fields to form electron optical lens systems that are analogous to the glass lenses of an optical light microscope. Electron microscopes are used to investigate the ultrastructure of a wide range of biological and inorganic specimens including microorganisms, cells, large molecules, biopsy samples, metals, and crystals. Industrially, electron microscopes are often used for quality control and failure analysis. Modern electron microscopes produce electron micrographs using specialized digital cameras and frame grabbers to capture the images. Diagram illustrating the phenomena resulting from the interaction of highly energetic electrons with matter In 1926, Hans Busch developed the electromagnetic lens. According to Dennis Gabor, the physicist Leó Szilárd tried in 1928 to convince him to build an electron microscope, for which he had filed a patent.[2] The first prototype electron microscope, capable of four-hundred-power magnification, was developed in 1931 by the physicist Ernst Ruska and the electrical engineer Max Knoll at the Berlin Technische Hochschule or Berlin Technical University.[3] The apparatus was the first practical demonstration of the principles of electron microscopy.[4] In May of the same year, Reinhold Rudenberg, the scientific director of Siemens-Schuckertwerke, obtained a patent for an electron microscope. In 1932, Ernst Lubcke of Siemens & Halske built and obtained images from a prototype electron microscope, applying the concepts described in Rudenberg's patent.[5] In the following year, 1933, Ruska built the first electron microscope that exceeded the resolution attainable with an optical (light) microscope.[4] Four years later, in 1937, Siemens financed the work of Ernst Ruska and Bodo von Borries, and employed Helmut Ruska, Ernst's brother, to develop applications for the microscope, especially with biological specimens.[4][6] Also in 1937, Manfred von Ardenne pioneered the scanning electron microscope.[7] Siemens produced the first commercial electron microscope in 1938.[8] The first North American electron microscopes were constructed in the 1930, at the Washington State University by Anderson and Fitzsimmons [9] and the University of Toronto, by Eli Franklin Burton and students Cecil Hall, James Hillier, and Albert Prebus. Siemens produced a transmission electron microscope (TEM) in 1939.[clarification needed][10] Although current transmission electron microscopes are capable of two million-power magnification, as scientific instruments, they remain based upon Ruska's prototype.[citation needed] Operating principle of a transmission electron microscope The original form of the electron microscope, the transmission electron microscope (TEM), uses a high voltage electron beam to illuminate the specimen and create an image. The electron beam is produced by an electron gun, commonly fitted with a tungsten filament cathode as the electron source. The electron beam is accelerated by an anode typically at +100 keV (40 to 400 keV) with respect to the cathode, focused by electrostatic and electromagnetic lenses, and transmitted through the specimen that is in part transparent to electrons and in part scatters them out of the beam. When it emerges from the specimen, the electron beam carries information about the structure of the specimen that is magnified by the objective lens system of the microscope. The spatial variation in this information (the "image") may be viewed by projecting the magnified electron image onto a fluorescent viewing screen coated with a phosphor or scintillator material such as zinc sulfide. Alternatively, the image can be photographically recorded by exposing a photographic film or plate directly to the electron beam, or a high-resolution phosphor may be coupled by means of a lens optical system or a fibre optic light-guide to the sensor of a digital camera. The image detected by the digital camera may be displayed on a monitor or computer. The resolution of TEMs is limited primarily by spherical aberration, but a new generation of hardware correctors can reduce spherical aberration to increase the resolution in high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) to below 0.5 angstrom (50 picometres),[1] enabling magnifications above 50 million times.[11] The ability of HRTEM to determine the positions of atoms within materials is useful for nano-technologies research and development.[12] Transmission electron microscopes are often used in electron diffraction mode. The advantages of electron diffraction over X-ray crystallography are that the specimen need not be a single crystal or even a polycrystalline powder, and also that the Fourier transform reconstruction of the object's magnified structure occurs physically and thus avoids the need for solving the phase problem faced by the X-ray crystallographers after obtaining their X-ray diffraction patterns. One major disadvantage of the transmission electron microscope is the need for extremely thin sections of the specimens, typically about 100 nanometers. Creating these thin sections for biological and materials specimens is technically very challenging. Semiconductor thin sections can be made using a focused ion beam. Biological tissue specimens are chemically fixed, dehydrated and embedded in a polymer resin to stabilize them sufficiently to allow ultrathin sectioning. Sections of biological specimens, organic polymers, and similar materials may require staining with heavy atom labels in order to achieve the required image contrast. Serial-section electron microscope (ssEM)One application of TEM is serial-section electron microscopy (ssEM), for example in analyzing the connectivity in volumetric samples of brain tissue by imaging many thin sections in sequence.[13] This may be achieved by introducing a milling method into the imaging pipeline, by which successive slices of a 3D volume are exposed to the beam and imaged. These methods include Serial Block Face SEM (SB-SEM)[14] and Focused Ion Beam-SEM (FIB-SEM).[15][16] Pre-processing of volumes to create many slices which are imaged in an automated fashion have recently achieved high-throughput imaging of volumes up to 1 mm3.[17] Using this method, entire local neuronal microcircuits may be resolved, though the equipment and time requirements for this are still significant: imaging a 1 mm3 block of brain tissue required 6 months of near-continuous imaging by six TEM running in parallel. Scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM)The STEM rasters a focused incident probe across a specimen that (as with the TEM) has been thinned to facilitate detection of electrons scattered through the specimen. The high resolution of the TEM is thus possible in STEM. The focusing action (and aberrations) occur before the electrons hit the specimen in the STEM, but afterward in the TEM. The STEMs use of SEM-like beam rastering simplifies annular dark-field imaging, and other analytical techniques, but also means that image data is acquired in serial rather than in parallel fashion. Often TEM can be equipped with the scanning option and then it can function both as TEM and STEM. Scanning electron microscope (SEM)Operating principe of a scanning electron microscope Image of Bacillus subtilis taken with a 1960s electron microscope The SEM produces images by probing the specimen with a focused electron beam that is scanned across a rectangular area of the specimen (raster scanning). When the electron beam interacts with the specimen, it loses energy by a variety of mechanisms. The lost energy is converted into alternative forms such as heat, emission of low-energy secondary electrons and high-energy backscattered electrons, light emission (cathodoluminescence) or X-ray emission, all of which provide signals carrying information about the properties of the specimen surface, such as its topography and composition. The image displayed by an SEM maps the varying intensity of any of these signals into the image in a position corresponding to the position of the beam on the specimen when the signal was generated. In the SEM image of an ant shown below and to the right, the image was constructed from signals produced by a secondary electron detector, the normal or conventional imaging mode in most SEMs. Generally, the image resolution of an SEM is lower than that of a TEM. However, because the SEM images the surface of a sample rather than its interior, the electrons do not have to travel through the sample. This reduces the need for extensive sample preparation to thin the specimen to electron transparency. The SEM is able to image bulk samples that can fit on its stage and still be maneuvered, including a height less than the working distance being used, often 4 millimeters for high-resolution images. The SEM also has a great depth of field, and so can produce images that are good representations of the three-dimensional surface shape of the sample. Another advantage of SEMs comes with environmental scanning electron microscopes (ESEM) that can produce images of good quality and resolution with hydrated samples or in low, rather than high, vacuum or under chamber gases. This facilitates imaging unfixed biological samples that are unstable in the high vacuum of conventional electron microscopes. An image of an ant in a scanning electron microscope Reflection electron microscope (REM)In the reflection electron microscope (REM) as in the TEM, an electron beam is incident on a surface but instead of using the transmission (TEM) or secondary electrons (SEM), the reflected beam of elastically scattered electrons is detected. This technique is typically coupled with reflection high energy electron diffraction (RHEED) and reflection high-energy loss spectroscopy (RHELS).[citation needed] Another variation is spin-polarized low-energy electron microscopy (SPLEEM), which is used for looking at the microstructure of magnetic domains.[18] Scanning tunneling microscopy (STM)In STM, a conductive tip held at a voltage is brought near a surface, and a profile can be obtained based on the tunneling probability of an electron from the tip to the sample since it is a function of distance. In their most common configurations, electron microscopes produce images with a single brightness value per pixel, with the results usually rendered in greyscale.[19] However, often these images are then colourized through the use of feature-detection software, or simply by hand-editing using a graphics editor. This may be done to clarify structure or for aesthetic effect and generally does not add new information about the specimen.[20] In some configurations information about several specimen properties is gathered per pixel, usually by the use of multiple detectors.[21] In SEM, the attributes of topography and material contrast can be obtained by a pair of backscattered electron detectors and such attributes can be superimposed in a single colour image by assigning a different primary colour to each attribute.[22] Similarly, a combination of backscattered and secondary electron signals can be assigned to different colours and superimposed on a single colour micrograph displaying simultaneously the properties of the specimen.[23] Some types of detectors used in SEM have analytical capabilities, and can provide several items of data at each pixel. Examples are the energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) detectors used in elemental analysis and cathodoluminescence microscope (CL) systems that analyse the intensity and spectrum of electron-induced luminescence in (for example) geological specimens. In SEM systems using these detectors, it is common to colour code the signals and superimpose them in a single colour image, so that differences in the distribution of the various components of the specimen can be seen clearly and compared. Optionally, the standard secondary electron image can be merged with the one or more compositional channels, so that the specimen's structure and composition can be compared. Such images can be made while maintaining the full integrity of the original signal, which is not modified in any way. An insect coated in gold for viewing with a scanning electron microscope Materials to be viewed under an electron microscope may require processing to produce a suitable sample. The technique required varies depending on the specimen and the analysis required:
JEOL transmission and scanning electron microscope made in the mid-1970s Electron microscopes are expensive to build and maintain, but the capital and running costs of confocal light microscope systems now overlaps with those of basic electron microscopes. Microscopes designed to achieve high resolutions must be housed in stable buildings (sometimes underground) with special services such as magnetic field canceling systems. The samples largely have to be viewed in vacuum, as the molecules that make up air would scatter the electrons. An exception is liquid-phase electron microscopy[38] using either a closed liquid cell or an environmental chamber, for example, in the environmental scanning electron microscope, which allows hydrated samples to be viewed in a low-pressure (up to 20 Torr or 2.7 kPa) wet environment. Various techniques for in situ electron microscopy of gaseous samples have been developed as well.[39] Scanning electron microscopes operating in conventional high-vacuum mode usually image conductive specimens; therefore non-conductive materials require conductive coating (gold/palladium alloy, carbon, osmium, etc.). The low-voltage mode of modern microscopes makes possible the observation of non-conductive specimens without coating. Non-conductive materials can be imaged also by a variable pressure (or environmental) scanning electron microscope. Small, stable specimens such as carbon nanotubes, diatom frustules and small mineral crystals (asbestos fibres, for example) require no special treatment before being examined in the electron microscope. Samples of hydrated materials, including almost all biological specimens have to be prepared in various ways to stabilize them, reduce their thickness (ultrathin sectioning) and increase their electron optical contrast (staining). These processes may result in artifacts, but these can usually be identified by comparing the results obtained by using radically different specimen preparation methods. Since the 1980s, analysis of cryofixed, vitrified specimens has also become increasingly used by scientists, further confirming the validity of this technique.[40][41][42]
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Electron microscopes.
|