Studies of a magnetically focused electrostatic mirror. II. Aberration corrections

Chicago aberration correction work

The author describes from his personal involvement the many improvements to electron microscopy Albert Crewe and his group brought by minimizing the effects of aberrations. The Butler gun was developed to minimize aperture aberrations in a field emission electron gun. In the 1960s, Crewe anticipated using a spherical aberration corrector based on Scherzer's design. Since the tolerances could not be met mechanically, a method of moving the center of the octopoles electrically was developed by adding lower order multipole fields. Because the corrector was located about 15 cm ahead of the objective lens, combination aberrations would arise with the objective lens. This fifth order aberration would then limit the aperture of the microscope. The transformation of the off axis aberration coefficients of a round lens was developed and a means to cancel anisotropic coma was developed. A new method of generating negative spherical aberration was invented using the combination aberrations of hexapoles. Extensions of this technique to higher order aberrations were developed. An electrostatic electron mirror was invented, which allows the cancellation of primary spherical aberration and first order chromatic aberration. A reduction of chromatic aberration by two orders of magnitude was demonstrated using such a system.

Aberration correction past and present

Electron lenses are extremely poor: if glass lenses were as bad, we should see as well with the naked eye as with a microscope! The demonstration by Otto Scherzer in 1936 that skillful lens design could never eliminate the spherical and chromatic aberrations of rotationally symmetric electron lenses was therefore most unwelcome and the other great electron optician of those years, Walter Glaser, never ceased striving to find a loophole in Scherzer's proof. In the wartime and early post-war years, the first proposals for correcting C(s) were made and in 1947, in a second milestone paper, Scherzer listed these and other ways of correcting lenses; soon after, Dennis Gabor invented holography for the same purpose. These approaches will be briefly summarized and the work that led to the successful implementation of quadupole-octopole and sextupole correctors in the 1990 s will be analysed. In conclusion, the elegant role of image algebra in describing image formation and processing and, above all, in developing new methods will be mentioned.

Personal recollection. Some Chicago aberrations

This article presents my reminiscences of the work in Chicago on the correction or reduction of lens aberrations. Studies began in the early 1960s and extended over a period of almost 40 years, although it was never the primary focus of the work of the laboratory. The account is almost entirely based on my own memory, which is not a very reliable instrument. It is not intended to be a review and is more accurately describable as a personal recollection.