A New Correlative Approach for Structure Determination & Imaging of Molecular Materials

Electron microscopy (EM) is now an indispensable tool for nanoscale imaging and analysis, enabling many important discoveries across the engineering, physical and life sciences. It is widely accepted that the level of structural, chemical and dynamic information currently accessible by EM is limited by material stability under the electron beam and/or the temporal resolution of the data capture system, rather than by microscope resolution. Recently developed fast-pixelated electron cameras (EC) have created a new paradigm for the investigation of challenging molecular and e-beam sensitive materials that are generally incompatible with conventional EM environments (vacuum, ionising radiation etc.). Their stabilisation and effective analysis necessitate combinations of low-dose, high-sensitivity and ultra-fast data acquisition approaches, often combined with cryogenic stabilisation. Here, we seek to install a complementary pair of high-performance & direct-detection electron cameras (HP-EC & DD-EC) on two transmission electron microscopes (TEM: Jeol 2100Plus and 2100F), housed in the interdisciplinary Nanoscale & Microscale Research Centre (nmRC), with associated high-tilt, cryo-transfer TEM holder (HT-CTH) and scanning TEM (STEM) diffraction system control, to create a new research capability in the UK for correlated morphological & molecular dynamic investigations.

Low-dose and/or cryogenically stabilised imaging will be used for the rapid acquisition of tilt-series for the tomographic reconstruction of materials, with greatly improved information content, for investigations of hydrogels to cell/scaffold interactions. Ultra-fast, dynamic imaging will be used to observe chemical reactions in real-time, towards the development of catalysts & energy materials. This EC capability will provide also for microcrystal electron diffraction (microED) for structure determination of sub-micron sized supramolecular crystals, for energy efficient separation...