Scanning electron microscopy for materials characterization

Current materials are usually complex in chemistry, three-dimensional in form, and of rapidly diminishing microstructural scale. To characterize such materials the scanning electron microscope (SEM) now uses a wide range of operating conditions to target the desired sample volume, sophisticated modeling techniques to interpret the data. It also uses novel imaging modes to derive new types of information. These include depth-resolved three-dimensional data, and spatially resolved crystallographic data.