Where is electron microscope used

Here we compare two basic types of microscopes - optical and electron microscopes. The electron microscope uses a beam of electrons and their wave-like characteristics to magnify an object's image, unlike the optical microscope that uses visible light to magnify images.

Conventional optical microscopes can magnify between 40 to times, but recently what are known as "super-resolution" light microscopes have been developed that can magnify living biological cells up to 20, times or more. However, the electron microscope can resolve features that are more than 1 million times smaller.

Electron Microscopes EMs function like their optical counterparts except that they use a focused beam of electrons instead of photons to "image" the specimen and gain information as to its structure and composition. The basic steps involved in all EMs:. At the end of the 19th Century, physicists realized that the only way to improve on the light microscope was to use radiation of a much shorter wavelength.

Thompson in discovered the electron; others considered its wave-like properties. In , Louis deBroglie demonstrated that a beam of electrons traveling in a vacuum behaves as a form of radiation of very short wavelength, but it was Ernst Ruska who made the leap to use these wave-like properties of electrons to construct the first EM and to improve on the light microscope. Samples of hydrated materials, including almost all biological specimens have to be prepared in various ways to stabilize them, reduce their thickness ultrathin sectioning and increase their electron optical contrast staining.

Cathodoluminescence Spectroscopy. Elemental Analysis. What is called an EM Add-on detector? What is an Electron Microscope? Contact us Find us. The transmission electron microscope is used to view thin specimens tissue sections, molecules, etc through which electrons can pass generating a projection image.

The TEM is analogous in many ways to the conventional compound light microscope. TEM is used, among other things, to image the interior of cells in thin sections , the structure of protein molecules contrasted by metal shadowing , the organization of molecules in viruses and cytoskeletal filaments prepared by the negative staining technique , and the arrangement of protein molecules in cell membranes by freeze-fracture.

Conventional scanning electron microscopy depends on the emission of secondary electrons from the surface of a specimen.

Because of its great depth of focus, a scanning electron microscope is the EM analog of a stereo light microscope. It provides detailed images of the surfaces of cells and whole organisms that are not possible by TEM.