Invited Paper IE-MoM1
The TEAM Project and its Potential for In-Situ Experimentation

Monday, October 15, 2007, 8:00 am, Room 618

Advanced electron microscopes give us unprecedented views of materials and their unusual behavior on the nanoscale. It is possible to observe how a nanocrystal grows or melts or changes its structure atom by atom, or to investigate the structure of nanocrystals embedded in microcrystals. However, until now, electron microscopes have remained limited by lens aberrations. As it becomes possible to overcome this limitation with aberration correcting optics, a broad range of new possibilities for research and discovery by high resolution imaging opens up. The improved instrument resolution, contrast and sensitivity create the opportunity to directly observe the atomic-scale order, electronic structure, and dynamics of individual nanoscale structures. To take advantage of this opportunity, the TEAM project (Transmission Electron Aberration-corrected Microscope) brings together several microscopy groups in a collaborative effort to jointly design and construct a new generation microscope with extraordinary capabilities. Led by the National Center for Electron Microscopy, the project involves several Department of Energy research efforts and commercial partners. After its completion in 2009, the instrument will be made available to the scientific user community at the National Center for Electron Microscopy. The vision for the TEAM project is the idea of providing a sample space for electron scattering experiments in a tunable electron optical environment by removing some of the constraints that have limited electron microscopy until now. The resulting improvements in spatial, spectral and temporal resolution, the increased space around the sample, and the possibility of exotic electron-optical settings will enable new types of experiments. The TEAM microscope will feature unique corrector elements for spherical and chromatic aberrations, a novel AFM-inspired specimen stage, a high-brightness gun and numerous other innovations that will extend resolution down to the half-Angstrom level. The most important scientific driving force that emerged from a series of workshops is the need for in-situ experiments to observe directly the relationship between structure and properties of individual nanoscale objects. Successive instruments built on the TEAM platform would provide unique experimental capabilities to probe dynamics and mechanisms of reactions such as catalysis in a gaseous environment, or the effects of gradients in temperature, composition, stress, magnetic or electric fields. This talk will highlight some recent discoveries in nanoscale materials science using high resolution electron microscopy and outline some research opportunities for future users of TEAM instrument.

NCEM is supported by the Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC03-76SF00098.