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Electrons for crystallography

Electron crystallography

Nature volume 511, pages 14–15 (2014)Cite this article

The early realization that electrons diffract as waves provided a clear basis for their use in diffraction experiments. It was by exploiting their charge, however, that electrons eventually came into their own with the invention of the electron microscope.

In 1927, Hans Busch calculated that the magnetic field of a short coil acts on an electron beam just as a convex glass lens does on light, and that the focal length of such a magnetic lens can be tuned by the current coil. Ernst Ruska and Max Knoll pursued this notion further, and reasoned that it should be possible to obtain enlarged images of objects by focusing an electron beam. In 1931, they succeeded in making an apparatus based on this principle — the first electron microscope. The magnification of their instrument was extremely modest, but Ruska and Knoll estimated a resolution limit of 2.2 Å. In 1937, they teamed up with industrial partner Siemens, who in 1939 delivered the first serially manufactured instrument capable of magnifications of over 20,000 times.

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References

ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPERS

  1. Knoll, M. & Ruska, E. Das Elektronenmikroskop. Z. Phys. 78, 318–319 (1932)

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  2. DeRosier, D. J. & Klug, A. Reconstruction of three dimensional structures from electron micrographs. Nature 217, 130–134 (1968)

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FURTHER READING

  1. Klug, A. Nobel Lecture: From Macromolecules to Biological Assemblies (Nobel Foundation, 1982)

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  2. Ruska, E. Nobel Lecture: The Development of the Electron Microscope and of Electron Microscopy (Nobel Foundation, 1986)

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  3. Glaeser, R., Downing, K., DeRosier, D., Chiu, W. & Frank, J. Electron Crystallography of Biological Macromolecules (Oxford Univ. Press, 2007)

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  4. Zou, X., Hovmöller, S. & Oleynikov, P. Electron Crystallography: Electron Microscopy And Electron Diffraction (Oxford Univ. Press, 2011)

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  5. Spence, J. C. H. High-Resolution Electron Microscopy 4th edn (Oxford Univ. Press, 2013)

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  1. Associate Editor, Nature Physics,

    Bart Verberck

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  1. Bart Verberck
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Verberck, B. Electrons for crystallography. Nature 511 (Suppl 7509), 14–15 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature13362

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