Keywords

Energy electron loss spectroscopy is already an established technique to study structure and property relationship required to optimize materials and make break-through inventions in material science. So far EELS lacks performance at energy losses higher than 2 keV to obtain bonding or coordination state information via ELNES or EXELFS with high lateral resolution [1]. We used a new optical setup designed to optimize the coupling between spectrometer and post-specimen optics for high energy resolution and high collection efficiency. The new setup implemented on the new Iliad microscope platform allows to minimize the acquisition time (minutes) and the beam current to avoid sample damage or drift artifacts. The new setup allows to achieve results beyond the earlier attempts reported in literature [2]. The real application benefit in EELS is its spatial resolution which can go down to atomic resolution which is not accessible for XAS. A challenge lays in analysis of elements in low concentration due to the signal strength. For this reason we have made a comparison between XAS and EELS data from a tens of nanometers size precipitate on the Zr L23 edge in high-strength, translucent glass-ceramics in the system MgO-ZnO-Al2O3-SiO2-ZrO2 with only 5.8% zirconia in the compound [3]. The comparison of ELNES with XANES reference data clearly reveals that the coordination is CN=8. For a more quantitative comparison the setup was used to acquire Cu_K edge at 8.98 keV energy loss from metallic Cu, CuO and Cu2O. The EELS data is benchmarked against XAS data in XANES and EXELFS and relevant information is extracted from the EELS data using similar analysis as done for XAS data.