Electron tomography on micrometer-thick specimens with nanometer resolution

Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) is a well-established technique to explore matter down to the atomic scale. TEM tomography methodshave been developed to obtain volume information at the mesoscopic dimensions of devices or complex mixtures of multiphase objects withnanometer resolution, but these methods are in general only applicable to relatively thin specimens with a few hundred nanometer thicknessat most. Here we introduce an approach based on scanning TEM (STEM) tomography that pushes the resolution in three dimensions downto a few nanometers for several micrometer ultrathick specimens using a conventional TEM with 300 kV accelerating voltage, and we demonstrateits versatility for materials research and nanotechnology