Advances in atomic resolution secondary electron imaging

Joel Martis; Benjamin Plotkin-Swing; Michael T. Hotz; Niklas Dellby; Tracy C. Lovejoy; Steven C. Quillin; Tomáš Radlička; Cong Su; Gerardo Algara-Siller; Ondrej L. Krivanek

doi:10.1051/epjap/2025007

2023 Impact factor 0.9

Applied Physics

Special Issue on ‘Imaging, Diffraction, and Spectroscopy on the micro/nanoscale (EMC 2024)’, edited by Jakob Birkedal Wagner and Randi Holmestad

Open Access

Eur. Phys. J. Appl. Phys. 100, 9 (2025)
https://doi.org/10.1051/epjap/2025007

Original Article

Advances in atomic resolution secondary electron imaging

Joel Martis¹^*^,a, Benjamin Plotkin-Swing¹^,a, Michael T. Hotz¹, Niklas Dellby¹, Tracy C. Lovejoy¹, Steven C. Quillin¹, Tomáš Radlička², Cong Su³, Gerardo Algara-Siller⁴ and Ondrej L. Krivanek¹^,5^**

¹ Bruker AXS LLC, 11511 NE 118th St, Kirkland, WA 98034, USA
² Institute of Scientific Instruments of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Královopolská 147, Brno, Czech Republic
³ Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520, USA
⁴ Department of Physics & Center for the Science of Materials, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 12489 Berlin, Germany
⁵ Department of Physics, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA

^* e-mail: Joel.Martis@bruker.com
^** e-mail: krivanek.ondrej@gmail.com

Received: 2 November 2024
Accepted: 17 February 2025
Published online: 20 March 2025

Abstract

We have developed an efficient detector of secondary electrons (SEs) for a high-performance scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) and tested it on several materials. Using the detector at 60 keV, we resolved the nearest neighbor atoms separated by 0.142 nm in SE images of graphene, and detected single-atom substitutions in graphene and monolayer MoS₂. We imaged single heavy atoms on an amorphous carbon thin film, and the surface structure of gold nanoparticles supported on a thin film as well as on a bulk substrate. Other application examples shown in this paper include SE imaging combined with 4D STEM, simultaneous SE and electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS) imaging, and simultaneous imaging of entrance and exit sides of a sample using two separate SE detectors. The results point to an exciting future for atomic-resolution SE imaging.

Key words: Atomic-resolution / secondary-electron-imaging / multi-modal-imaging / 2D-materials

Joel Martis and Benjamin Plotkin-Swing contributed equally to this work.

© J. Martis et al., Published by EDP Sciences, 2025

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.