Contamination-Free Transmission Electron Microscopy for High-Resolution Carbon Elemental Mapping of Polymers

This study utilizes the Evactron® D-C for TEMs. The "contamination-free TEM" allowed researchers to accomplish high-resolution carbon elemental mapping by energy-filtered transmission electron microscopy (EFTEM) on the nanostructure of soft materials. In addition, this study illustrates that although TEM cryo-observation is known to be effective in reducing specimen damage, it was not observed to help in carbon mapping, suggesting that the cooling of the specimen may actually increase the contamination deposition rate. In the case of polymers, the detection of carbon is much simpler than those of other light elements because of its high content. Being able to do carbon analysis by elemental mapping and EELS with high spatial resolution without problematic contamination could lead to improvements for various soft-material nanoanalyses by EFTEM. This study suggests that the analytical technique utilizing the "contamination-free TEM" also offers possibilities in studies requiring extended exposure time of the electron beam, such as EELS, nanobeam diffraction and electron tomography.