1802 Microsc. Microanal. 28 (Suppl 1), 2022
doi:10.1017/S1431927622007127 © Microscopy Society of America 2022
Advancements in UltraFast Electron Microscopy
Darrin Leonhardt
1*
, Eric Montgomery
1
, Chunguang Jing
2
, Bart Wyderski
2
, Yubin Zhao
2
, Spencer
Reisbick
3
, Yimei Zhu
3
, June Lau
4
, and John Roehling
5
1
Euclid Techlabs, LLC, Beltsville, MD, USA
2
Euclid Techlabs, LLC, Bolingbrook, IL, USA
3
Department of Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science, Brookhaven National Laboratory,
Upton, NY, USA
4
Materials Science and Engineering Division, National Institute of Standards and Technology,
Gaithersburg, MD, USA
5
Materials Science Division, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, CA, USA
* Corresponding author: d.leonhardt@euclidtechlabs.com
With the growing applications of temporally-resolved electron microscopy for probing basic chemical
and electronic phenomena as well as reducing beam-induced damage, a multifaceted approach to
ultrafast transmission electron microscopy is provided. Complex laser techniques with fixed image
acquisition times have been complemented by ultrafast rf and microwave-driven techniques that can be
synchronized with any sample excitation (laser, rf, thermal) with much faster image acquisition times
(from days to minutes), enabling more reliable data and microscope efficiency.
Originally a basic research tool for materials science, transmission electron microscopes (TEMs) have
seen a renaissance, as they have been applied in nearly every technology-based field. It has become the
gold standard of high spatial resolution techniques and the ever-increasing applications from quantum
dots to cellular 3D tomography and holography demand a wider range of imaging capabilities. TEMs are
used to connect photonics, nanodevice architecture, and biophysics, each with their individual intrinsic
response times on the nanoscale. The continued evolution of applications and maturation of basic TEM
instruments have not only created additional sectors in the TEM industry (life sciences, nanotechnology,
and semiconductor), but have fostered significant growth in these areas that the new market sectors are
comparable in size to the once dominant materials science market [1].
A graphical representation of these growing technology areas with some key applications is provided in
Figure 1 with relevant time scales for areas of materials science (red), life sciences (blue),
semiconductor (grey) and nanotechnology (green). (Abbreviations DYN and STR represent dynamics
and strength, respectively.) Generally, the picosecond regime is common for interrogating basic
material phenomena, then longer time scales are generally necessary as material systems get larger
physically. Ultrafast TEM (UTEM) was developed using lasers and photocathodes in the mid-2000s to
interrogate time-resolved responses to optical stimuli [2]. While ultrafast lasers were a natural enabler
for early research in UTEM, the explosive growth of these new applications based on large molecules
(proteins, cells) and new 2D/3D architectures (NEMS/MEMS, nanosheets, spintronics) requires broader
temporal capabilities due to their widely varying response times. Complementary enabling technologies
(rf, microwave) have been used in many of these cases with simplified and typically improved imaging
performance.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1431927622007127 Published online by Cambridge University Press