ABSTRACT
The electron microscope (EM) was developed in the 1930s primarily as an imaging device which exceeded the resolution power of the light microscope by several orders of magnitude. With the evolution towards dedicated instruments designed to answer specific structural and analytical questions, electron microscopy (EM) has grown into a heterogeneous field of electron beam devices. These allow the study of the interaction
of electrons with the sample, which can subsequently be interpreted as information about object structure or chemical composition. Therefore, EM must be compared to other high-resolution diffraction methods, such as x-ray or neutron scattering, or to spectroscopic techniques such as electron spin resonance spectroscopy (ESR) and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR). More recent, non-diffractive techniques include scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) (for a detailed discussion see chapter B1.19).
