Determining resolution in the transmission electron microscope: object-defined resolution below 0.5Å

The Transmission Electron Aberration-corrected Microscope (TEAM) project was initiated by the US Department of Energy as a collaborative effort to redesign the electron microscope around aberration-corrected optics [1], and is aimed at achieving 50 pm resolution. But the ability to resolve deep sub-Angstrom spacing entails a number of unresolved questions that can now be addressed. Among them is an ongoing debate about the physical meaning of resolution. Traditional strategies include the recording of Young’s fringes, the detection of image Fourier components from STEM images, the demonstration of a suitable peak separation in periodic lattices or signal width measurements from images of single atoms, to name a few. The drawback is that seemingly conflicting results are produced [e.g. 2]. Further, these methods define resolution through a selectable object, unlike light microscopy where resolution is instrument-defined. Two limitations of this approach are electron channeling [3, 4] and elastic scattering at single crystals [5]. The TEAM Project adopted a pragmatic view of information transfer below 50 pm: detecting Young’s fringes in TEM and (660) image Fourier components from gold (111) STEM images at 48 pm. Recently the TEAM 0.5 prototype microscope achieved this goal [1].