The development of the electron microscope and of electron microscopy

Abstract

A. PARENTS* HOUSE, FAMILYA month ago, the Nobel Foundation sent me its yearbook of 1985. From it I learned that many Nobel lectures are downright scientific lectures, interspersed with curves, synoptic tables, and quotations. I am somewhat reluctant to give here such a lecture on something that can be looked up in any modern schoolbook on physics. I will therefore not so much report here on physical and technical details and their connections but rather on the human experiences-some joyful events and many disappointments which were not spared me and my colleagues on our way to the final breakthrough. This is not meant to be a complaint though; I rather feel that such experiences of scientists in quest of new approaches are absolutely understandable, or even normal.In such a representation I must, of course, consider the influence of my environment, in particular of my family. There had already been some scientists in my family: My father, Julius Ruska, was a historian of sciences in Heidelberg and Berlin; my uncle, Max Wolf, astronomer in Heidelberg; his assistant, a former pupil of my father and my godfather, August Kopff, Director of the Institute for Astronomical Calculation of the former Friedrich-Wilhelm University in Berlin. A cousin of my mother, Alfred Hoche, was Professor for Psychiatry in Freiburg/Breisgau; my grandfather from my mother's side, Adalbert Merx, theologian in Giessen and Heidelberg.My parents lived in Heidelberg and had seven children. I was the fifth, my brother Helmut the sixth. To him I had particularly close and friendly relations as long as I can remember. Early, optical instruments made a strong impression on us. Several times Uncle Max had shown us the telescopes at the observatory on the Konigstuhl near Heidelberg headed by him. With the light microscope, as well, we soon had impressive, yet contradictory, relations. In the second floor of our house, my father had two study rooms connected by a broad sliding door, which usually was open. One room he used for his scientific historical studies relating to classical philology, the other for his scientific interests, in particular mineralogy, botany, and zoology. When our games with neighbors' kids in front This lecture was delivered 8 December 1986, on the occasion of the presentation of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics. of the house became too noisy, he would knock at the window panes. This usually having only a brief effect, he soon knocked a second time, this time considerably louder. At the third knock, Helmut and I had to come to his room and sit still on a low wooden stool, dos-d-dos, up to one hour at 2 m distance from his desk. While doing so we would see on a table in the other room the pretty yellowish wooden box that housed my father's big Zeiss microscope, which we were strictly forbidden to touch. He sometimes demonstrated to us interesting objects under the microscope, it is true; for good reasons, however, he feared that children's hands would damage the objective or the specimen by clumsy manipulation of the coarse and ...

Luminescence experiments on supported molecules with the scanning tunneling microscope

“…It supports a localized surface plasmon resonance associated with the collective oscillation of the free conduction electrons. The geometry-and materialdependent plasmon resonance plays a crucial role in the two 2 The average plasmon frequency for a given combination of the tip and sample material can be expressed as: ω P = [2ω 2 1 ω 2 2 /(ω 2 1 + ω 2 2 )] 1/2 , where ω 1 is the bulk plasmon frequency of the particle and ω 2 is the bulk plasmon frequency of the sample [64]. enhancement processes (excitation and radiation) [27,28].…”

“…atomic scale has been a strong motivation for the development of a variety of experimental techniques. Although Abbe's discovery of the diffraction barrier led to the notion that a far-field light microscope cannot resolve spatial structures which are smaller than about half of the wavelength of light [1], electron [2], X-ray [3], and scanning near-field optical microscopy (SNOM) [4][5][6][7][8] had been invented to overcome this barrier. Confocal microscopy or nearfield optical techniques provide a spatial resolution down to a 0167-5729/$ -see front matter © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.…”

Transform-based backprojection for volume reconstruction of large format electron microscope tilt series

“…In real magnetic lenses, to create short focal lengths, the magnetic fields are concentrated using pole pieces (Ruska, 1986). This creates rotationally symmetric, but nonuniform magnetic field lines.…”

Stranski, Krastanov, and Kaischew, and their influence on the founding of crystal growth theory

“…One of the most important of Stranski's contributions from this period is the analysis of electron emission and adsorption of contaminants on different crystal faces. Later his approach and results were used by Prof. Mueller and co-inventors for the invention of the field electron microscope [1,22]. In Germany Stranski also actively studied the mechanism of evaporation and condensation of different substrates, like sapphire and white phosphorus, and proposed a new (the Knacke-Stranski or Stranski-Wollf) mechanism of condensation, applicable to covalently bonded substances, where surface migration is excluded [23,24].…”