Beyondnano infrastructure of CNR-IMM located in Catania. The vocation of the lab, always based on supporting important partners, such as, government, academia, and industrial research community groups in the physical sciences, through the use of state-of-the-art instruments, well responds to the strategic mission of the ESTEEM project. The main strategy of the lab is based on the ability to exploit the most powerful characterization techniques.
Beyonano EM Lab facility owns a fully equipped specimen preparation rooms for mechanical thinning of the specimens and final ionic polishing sistems. As far as the mechanical thinning the lab has: an Allied MultiPrep System TEM wedge polishers, a Buehler disc grinder, a Gatan ultra-sonic disk cutter, a South-bay diamond saw, an allied TechCut 4 precision low speed saw, and a Gatan dimple grinder.
For the final ionic thinning and polishing, the lab has: a Gatan PIPS forl final thinning and a Gatan PIPS II for final polishing a very low energy such as 100eV.
For specimen carbon decontamination a Fischione 1020 plasma cleaner and a customized degasing station able to simultaneously heat and degas the specimens directly mounted on the specimen holder, are available.
(i) The probe Cs-aberration (CEOS CESCOR) corrected JEOL ARM 200CF
The Electron microscope installed in the Catania facility is one of the most performing and stable microscope all over the world. It combines a number of full equipped complementary techniques able to perform simultaneously and quickly both structural and chemical analysis at sub-Å resolution, such as: HAADF-STEM; ABF-STEM; dual-EELS; joint fast EELS-EDX; nano-diffraction, and tomography; All combined with a JEOL ARM CFEG Cs probe corrected, installed into an environmental ultra-stable laboratory. In STEM mode the microscope is able to work in a energy range between 200keV and 40keV and allows imaging at a spatial resolution of 618 pm at 200 kV and 136 pm at 40 kV.
The microscope is equipped with a cold field-emission gun, a Gatan GIF Quantum ER energy filter with DualEELS, joint FastEELS-EDX with hardware high speed upgrade for up to 1500 spectra/sec and nano-difraction options, a Centurio energy-dispersive X-ray system with a large solid angle SDD X-ray detector, Gatan UltraScan 1000XP and Gatan Orius SC200D CCD cameras as well as 5 STEM detectors. A whole set of specimen holder for analytical, tomography and in-situ microscopy in included.
A particular attention is given to the development of new simulation algorithms based on ab-initio, Monte Carlo, and finite elements methods, mainly aimed at the study of the electronic density for the interpretation of EELS spectra. In addition, several software packages are already owned by the lab, among them it is worth to cite: Wien2K, Jems, Quantum Espresso, and Siesta, which are particularly used for routine, qualitative and quantitative studies. TEMography software for 3D STEM/TEM Acquisition, Reconstruction and Visualization and Gatan EELS Advisor complete the suite that we may share to external users within the transnational access.