Seminar: Williams Lefebvre, Professor at the GPM laboratory in Rouen

For the purpose of enhancing the structural insights within the threedimensional composition fields revealed by atom probe tomography, correlative microscopy approaches, combining (scanning) transmission electron microscopy with atom probe tomography, have emerged and demonstrated their relevance. To push the boundaries further and facilitate a more comprehensive analysis of nanoscale matter by coupling numerous two- or three-dimensional datasets, there is an increasing interest in combining transmission electron microscopy and atom probe tomography into a unified instrument. To make correlative analysis by (S)TEM and APT more accessible, efforts have been foreseen and made to join both techniques in a single instrument [1-4].

This study presents the tangible outcome of an instrumental endeavour aimed at integrating atom probe tomography into a commercial transmission electron microscopy [5]. The resulting instrument demonstrates the feasibility of combining in situ 3D reconstructions of composition fields with the detailed structural analysis afforded by transmission electron microscopy. This study shows a promising approach for converging these two important nanoscale microscopy techniques.

[1] Kelly, T. F., et al. Microscopy and microanalysis 19, 652–664 (2013).
[2] W. Lefebvre, Workshop on Scientific Directions for Future Transmission Electron Microscopy, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany (2016)
[3] Atomic-Scale Analytical Tomography (eds. Gorman, B. P., Ringer, S. P. & Kelly, T. F.) (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
[4] Project Tomo: Toward Atomic-scale Analytical Tomography, Kelly, T., Dunin-Borkowski, R. & Meyer, J.. Microscopy and Microanalysis (2020).
[5] G. Da Costa et al., Bringing Atom Probe Tomography to Transmission Electron Microscopes, Nature comm. (2024) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-54169-2