CityU becomes world’s first university to manufacture next-generation self-designed electron microscopes
Disclaimer: The South China Morning Post's content is directed by the Chinese Communist Party. It is not a reliable news source.
[The content of this article has been produced by our advertising partner.]
A research team at City University of Hong Kong (CityU) is pioneering advanced technology for the next-generation self-design and manufacture of electron microscopes (EMs). CityU is the first university in the world to achieve this.
An EM system composed of a pulsed electron source, a fast camera, a staged pumping vacuum system, and an aberration corrector has been developed by a team led by Professor Chen Fu-rong, Chair Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. It is the first time-resolved electron microscope integrated with both scanning and transmission electron microscope modes in a compact format developed by a university-based research team.
The team’s ultimate goal is to develop a miniature high space-time resolved “quantum” EM that can be used to study atom dynamics of beam-sensitive materials.
Since EMs are capable of imaging at a significantly higher resolution than light microscopes and provide measurements and analysis at the micro-nano, and even the atomic scale, they are much sought after, especially in medicine, life science, chemistry, materials, integrated circuits and other research industries.
The team has overcome some longstanding problems in the development of EMs. Currently, EMs cannot overcome the scientific bottleneck of radiation damage on a sample and being limited to a static view of the sample, hindering their capability for studying small molecule and electron beam-sensitive materials. Furthermore, their size limits their application in space-expensive environments, such as space shuttles, and deep sea and deep earth research ships and devices.
To overcome these limitations, the CityU research team innovated a differential pumping design to improve the image quality, and developed the backscattered and secondary electron deflectors to enable basic scanning, magnification, imaging functions and observation of liquid samples and beam-sensitive materials.
The team…