Electron diffraction using transmission electron microscopy

Abstract

Electron diffraction via the transmission electron microscope is a powerful method for characterizing the structure of materials, including perfect crystals and defect structures. The advantages of electron diffraction over other methods, e.g., x-ray or neutron, arise from the extremely short wavelength (≈2 pm), the strong atomic scattering, and the ability to examine tiny volumes of matter (≈10 nm3). The NIST Materials Science and Engineering Laboratory has a history of discovery and characterization of new structures through electron diffraction, alone or in combination with other diffraction methods. This paper provides a survey of some of this work enabled through electron microscopy.

Toward High-Resolution Cryo-Electron Microscopy: Technical Review on Microcrystal-Electron Diffraction

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“…8) In the case of limited experimental phase equilibrium data, electron diffraction is an option for determining the crystal structure of a new phase. 9) From this reasoning, the crystal structure of the Cr-Nb-Re phase was determined by using SAED. In the area as shown in Fig.…”

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“…However, some proteins such as membrane proteins and protein complexes, may never yield the large well-ordered crystals and it takes significant time and resources to optimize the initial small crystals found during the screening process (Bill et al, 2011). Since early 1940s, electron diffraction has been used to solve the crystallographic problems (Bendersky & Gayle, 2001). The basic principle of electron crystallography is similar to X-ray crystallography in a concept that protein crystals scatters electron beam to produce a diffraction pattern.…”