Image-Spectroscopy: New Developments and Applications

The ability of modern TEMs to acquire a series of energy filtered images opens up new possibilities in energy loss compositional analysis. In particular, an electron spectroscopic imaging (ESI) series may be treated as a 2-D array of spectra whose resolution is dictated by the step size of the image series, as illustrated in Fig (a). This allows standard spectroscopic analysis techniques to be used on the extracted ‘image-spectra’, such as the removal of plural scattering by deconvolution. Examples of this are given in Fig (b) and (c), which show how Fourier-log and Fourier-ratio deconvolution can be used to recover the single scattering distribution (SSD) from both the low-loss and core-loss regions from a Cr specimen. A pure elemental sample is ideal for testing the validity of such analysis techniques for quantitative compositional mapping, and more details of this method will be published elsewhere. Further, for many simple metal systems, such as steels and alloys, and for simple semiconductors it is possible to model the plasmon contribution using a simple Drude-Lorentz model.