Gatan co-sponsors EDGE international EELS workshop in Grundlsee, Austria

Gatan continued its tradition of fostering leading-edge research on the limits of EELS-based analytical TEM and STEM through its sponsorship of and scientific contributions to the EDGE meeting held 1-5 May 2005 in Grundlsee, Austria. This year's meeting, organized and run by Prof. Ferdinand Hofer and his team at FELMI, TU Graz, was the fifth in a series of workshops held roughly every four years and first initiated by Gatan with its 1990 Lake Tahoe EELS workshop. With 140 participants from around the world, the record attendance at the EDGE meeting reflects the ever-expanding importance and applicability of the EELS technique to a variety of materials problems at the nanometer and subnanometer scale. Much of the work presented at the meeting demonstrated how EELS is uniquely positioned to help analytical microscopists take full advantange of the quantum leaps in spatial and energy resolution made possible with the recent advent of commercial TEM/STEM systems with spherical and higher-order aberration correctors, monochromators, and high-resolution electron energy spectrometers and filters.

Apart from Gatan's commercial sponsorship of the workshop, its research and development team also made direct contributions to the scientific program of the meeting with three platform and poster presentations with the following titles:

• The effect of spherical aberrations on energy-filtered imaging and spectral resolution for a post-column energy filter

• Mapping the visible absorption spectrum with a high resolution imaging energy filter on monochromated 200 kV TEM

• Optimizing & automating EELS/EFTEM parameter selection using a priori spectrum simulation

The first two of these papers report latest developments related to Gatan's GIF Tridiem ER/ERS line of energy loss filters capable of 0.1 - 0.25 eV energy resolution. The third paper reports on recent work with the EELS simulation technology built into its EELS Advisor product. Please click on the following Web link for full access to the EDGE meeting program and abstracts: http://www.energyloss.com/previous/index.php.