Forum 02/05/2004

“Overview of the National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM) and the TEAM Project”

Andrew Minor, Graduate Student, Research Asst. – LBL

This presentation will give an overview of the scientific capabilities and future projects at NCEM, a Department of Energy (DOE)-sponsored national user facility located at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, CA. Specifically, the most important future project for NCEM concerns the TEAM project, a collaboration between 5 DOE-supported electron beam microcharacterization laboratories to develop a next generation Transmission Electron Aberration-corrected Microscope (TEAM). Pioneering developments of aberration-correcting electron optics have created the unprecedented opportunity to directly observe the atomic-scale order, electronic structure, and dynamics of individual nanoscale structures by advanced transmission electron microscopy. It is foreseeable that aberration corrected electron microscopes exhibiting sub-ngstrom resolution with single atom sensitivity and an increased time – and energy resolution can be constructed within the next few years. Through the TEAM project, the Department of Energy’s electron beam microcharacterization centers have begun the development of advanced aberration corrected electron microscopes in order to build the infrastructure to make this instrumentation broadly available to the scientific user community.