Effect of accelerating voltage and thickness on an effective signal-to-noise ratio in electron energy loss spectroscopy

The effect of accelerating voltage and thickness on the signal-to-noise ratio was investigated. By measuring an effective signal-to-noise ratio, which allows appropriate comparison of data acquired at different incident energies, it is shown that improvements in the sensitivity at higher voltages depend on the angular scattering distribution of the edges of interest relative to the spectrometer collection conditions. The measurements also show that the effective sensitivity is reduced as a function of thickness.