Bryan Reed, Ides, Inc. | 5:45pm – 6:45pm | JEOL USA Booth #1804
It is well known that electrostatic beam blankers can dramatically outperform older magnetostatic systems. Electrostatic blankers can switch on the nanosecond scale, with zero hysteresis. This means cleanly turning the beam on and off at will, fast enough that transients simply don’t matter on typical time scales for electron microscopy, without worrying about the effect on image quality. What is perhaps more surprising is just how much difference this makes in the operation of the instrument, especially when aiming to optimize the ratio of acquired information to specimen damage. Eliminating dose during STEM flyback and interpixel transients becomes routine, as does using pulse width modulation to radically vary the beam current without affecting focus or alignment. These capabilities alone enable measurements that would otherwise be very challenging. But electrostatic blankers can do a great deal more, especially when designed for integration with complex automation and novel workflows. Integrating with the timing system of a scan controller enables “dose painting,” independently specifying the dose in every single pixel of a scan. This can be done adaptively, using previous acquisitions to decide how to apportion dose in space and time to measure what you want while damaging the sample as little as possible. This can be done frame by frame using advanced algorithms. It even can be done in real time, during each pixel, blanking the beam whenever an information threshold is reached and further dose would needlessly damage the simple while adding little new information. Together with new automation capabilities including improved drift correction during spectrum imaging and tools for easily defining new operating modes and workflows, fast blanking technology can fundamentally change the way you interact with your microscope.
IDES is a leader and pioneer in the field of Ultrafast and Dynamic TEM, specializing in pulsed lasers and high-speed electrostatic beam blanking and deflection technologies. To learn more,
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