Electron Beam Manipulation and Interaction Reconstruction for High-Resolution Electron Microscopy

电子显微镜提供了大量材料的原子分辨率图像，并被广泛用于推动科学和技术的创新和理解，帮助解决社会面临的主要挑战。最常见的电子显微镜是用聚焦的电子束扫描样品，并记录电子束与样品相互作用的指标来构造图像。然而，令人惊讶的是，这些显微镜目前忽视或无法获取关于光束如何与样品相互作用的大量信息。为了解决这个问题，新的显微镜探测器技术最近被开发出来，随着光束整形和定时技术的进步，允许访问大量增加的光束-样品相互作用的信息。我是第一个加拿大研究人员，成功地使用这些新一代探测器之一，结合先进的相互作用重建算法和我开发的高速采集系统，产生前所未有的原子分辨率图像。这个新系统中的技术和技术为电子显微镜提供了一个新的范例，我将在我的研究计划中推进。为了提供这些新的分辨率水平和额外的信息，需要取得进展，这些信息来自生物和软材料，这些材料很容易被电子束破坏，以及物理上坚硬的材料。这将通过研究和开发重建算法的改进，在空间和时间上塑造或操纵光束，以及探索导致电子束中样品降解的基本相互作用来实现。开发的新技术，以及在本课程中应用的材料的基本见解，将强烈影响生物材料，储能设备，医疗治疗和诊断材料以及先进计算设备的表征，开发和理解。此外，高素质的人才将在这个项目中得到培训，他们将站在电子显微镜的最前沿，并具有广泛的技能，可以在科学、工程和技术领先的行业中转移，特别是在需要先进的数值数据分析和处理的地方。

Electron microscopes provide atomic resolution images of a vast range of materials and are used intensively to drive innovations and understanding in the sciences and technologies that help address major challenges faced by society. The most common type of electron microscope scans a focused electron beam over a sample and records indicators of the beam - sample interaction to construct images. Surprisingly though, these microscopes currently disregard or are unable to access vast amounts of information on how the beam interacts with the sample. To address this, new microscope detector technologies have recently been developed, which along with advances in beam shaping and timing techniques, permit access to vastly increased information upon the beam - sample interaction. I was the first Canadian researcher to successfully use one of these new generation detectors in combination with advanced interaction reconstruction algorithms and a high-speed acquisition system I developed, to produce unprecedented atomic resolution images. The techniques and technologies in this new system present a new paradigm for electron microscopy that I will advance in my research program. Advances will be made that are required to provide these new levels of resolution and additional information from biological and soft materials, which are easily damaged by the electron beam, along with physically hard materials. This will be performed through a combination of researching and developing improvements to the reconstruction algorithms, shaping or manipulating the beam both spatially and temporally, and exploring the fundamental interactions that lead to sample degradation in the electron beam. The developed new techniques, and the fundamental insights given to materials they are applied to in this program, will strongly impact the characterization, development and understanding of biological materials, energy storage devices, medical therapeutic and diagnostic materials, and advanced computing devices, for example. Furthermore, highly qualified personnel will be trained within this program who will be at the forefront of electron microscopy and have broad skills transferable across science, engineering and technology lead industries, particularly where there is a need for advanced numerical data analysis and processing.