Nature 191, 1188 - 1189 (16 September 1961); doi:10.1038/1911188b0

Proposed Use of Magnetic Fields in Electron Microscopic Radioautography

LUCIEN G. CARO

The Rockefeller Institute, New York 21.

THE use of strong magnetic fields has been proposed as a possible way of increasing resolution in radio-autography¹. It was reasoned that a sufficiently strong magnetic field would bend the path of emitted -particles into a circle of arbitrarily small radius, thereby restricting the resulting radioautographic grains to a small zone around the source. In recent reports^2,3, Harford and Hamlin, using the same argument, attempted to improve the resolution of electron microscopic radioautographs by placing the specimens in a 10-kilogauss magnetic field during exposure. They could not demonstrate such an improvement; but they attributed a considerable increase in the number of exposed grains to the effect of the field on the -particles from tritium.

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