Knut W. Urban, Lei Jin

Peter Gruenberg Institute, Research Center Juelich, Juelich, Germany

In a chromatic and spherical aberration corrected electron microscope the two major resolution limitations of previous generations of instruments due to partial spatial and partial temporal coherence are significantly reduced. As only recently discovered the spatial resolution of such an instrument is limited by a previously concealed residual image spread whose origin is thermal nanomagnetic field-noise, also known as Johnson noise. The Juelich Titan 60-300 PICO instrument is the first (recently) equipped with an aberration corrector minimizing the effect of Johnson noise. We report on resolution tests demonstrating a record resolution for TEM of 48 pm at 200 keV, and we demonstrate a practical materials science resolution of 57 pm in an investigation of YAlO₃:Ce. Another unique advantage of spherical and chromatic aberration correction is energy-filtered TEM for which we demonstrate by imaging of the Si [110] dumb-bell atom pairs with electrons having suffered a L2,3 core loss a record resolution of 1.35 Å at 300 keV.