Elemental distribution of soft materials with newly designed 120kV TEM/STEM

TEM is commonly used for morphological observation of soft materials (a polymer, a biological specimen etc.), which consist of light elements. These materials show low contrast relative to inorganic materials in TEM images. The contrast of STEM image can be enhanced through analogue and/or digital signal processing. Lower voltage is advantageous for the image contrast. Some of polymers, biomaterials or living organisms contain an inorganic element into their body to develop their functional characters [1,2]. Elemental analysis of local area in the sample is effective for such materials. Therefore, the high contrast morphological observation and analysis (especially elemental maps) have been requested for those fields to clarify their characters. We report STEM and EDS mapping technique for these soft materials by 120kV TEM/STEM.