Market Study of Compressed Ultrafast Transmission Electron Microscopy (CUTEM)

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Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) is indispensable for numerous applications, including materials science, car industry, industrial inspection, nanotechnology, life sciences, semiconductors, mining & minerals sectors, and oil & gas industry. As Grand View Research Inc. reported in October 2018, the global electron microscope market size was valued at USD 3.2 billion in 2017. It is anticipated to expand at a CAGR of 7.4% over the forecast period (2018-2025). However, most TEM machines have moderate imaging speeds up to 200 frames per second, which are ultimately limited by imaging sensors. To overcome this limitation, dynamic TEM (D-TEM) was invented, but it has various drawbacks in the sequence depth, the temporal resolution, and the field of view. Thus far, there is no existing single-shot movie-mode TEM that could record hundreds of frames with sub-nanosecond temporal resolution and nanometer spatial resolution. Recently, we invented compressed ultrafast transmission electron microscopy (CUTEM) that offers a quantum leap in imaging capability from state-of-the-art D-TEM. CUTEM combines laser-assisted TEM with computational imaging methodologies based on compressed sensing (CS). With a minimum modification of commercially available D-TEM systems, CUTEM will add two additional components. First, a transmissive mask with a binary random pattern will spatially encode the electron probe beam. Second, a linear ramp voltage will be applied to the pair(s) of sweep electrodes to temporally shear individual temporal frames. Besides innovation in hardware, the proposed method will leverage a CS-based algorithm to retrieve information in time and two-dimensional space. This invention will achieve simultaneously a picosecond temporal resolution and a nanometer spatial resolution. It will also be able to record more than 100 frames in a single acquisition. Thus, it will provide an attractive electron imaging product for capturing irreversible chemical reactions, non-repeatable structural phenomena, and difficult-to-reproduce radiation-matter interactions.