HREM Research, provider of products and services for high-resolution electron microscopy sector, has introduced a new Quantitative Electron Diffraction (QED) software that offers new potential applications in the field of electron crystallography.
The QED software enables transmission electron microscopes to attain unique types of data. These microscopes produce enlarged images of samples. When an electron beam is transmitted via a crystallized protein or complex mineral, the electrons gets diffracted in a particular manner. By collecting the sample diffraction patterns that are spread in various directions, a particular crystal structure can be identified.
The QED software can manage all types of transmission electron microscopes and can gather Large-Angle Rocking-Beam Electron Diffraction patterns. Such patterns that are gathered for sample orientation offer 3-D data, which allows researchers to identify the exact facts about the crystalline material structure. These crystalline materials are used in a number of fields, including life science, materials science and geology.
Christoph Koch, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, has developed the Large-Angle Rocking-Beam Electron Diffraction process, which overcomes the issues related to multiple electron scatter.
Users can use the QED software to acquire the Large-Angle Rocking-Beam Electron Diffraction patterns by controlling the collimated electron beam’s position and tilt angle. The Large-Angle Rocking-Beam Electron Diffraction data collected from nano-scale samples provides information on thickness of crystalline material, the symmetry of thin samples, exact values of crystal structure factors and specimen surface orientation.
Max Planck Innovation has licensed the QED software from HREM.