1. Elemental quantification using electron energy-loss spectroscopy with a low voltage scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM-EELS).
- Author
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Dumaresq N, Brodusch N, Bessette S, and Gauvin R
- Abstract
Electron beam damage in electron microscopes is becoming more and more problematic in material research with the increasing demand of characterization of new beam sensitive material such as Li based compounds used in lithium-ion batteries. To avoid radiolysis damage, it has become common practice to use Cryo-EM, however, knock-on damage can still occur in conventional TEM/STEM with a high-accelerating voltage (200-300 keV). In this work, electron energy loss spectroscopy with an accelerating voltage of 30,20 and 10 keV was explored with h-BN, TiB
2 and TiN compounds. All Ti L2,3, N K and B K edges were successfully observed with an accelerating voltage as low as 10 keV. An accurate elemental quantification for all three samples was obtained using a multi-linear least square (MLLS) procedure which gives at most a 5 % of standard deviation which is well within the error of the computation of the inelastic partial-cross section used for the quantification. These results show the great potential of using low-voltage EELS which is another step towards a knock-on damage free analysis., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests: Raynald Gauvin reports financial support was provided by Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Raynald Gauvin reports financial support was provided by Hydro-Québec. If there are other authors, they declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)- Published
- 2024
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