Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

At ORNL, the new Advanced Microscopy Laboratory (AML) has recently been completed, with two aberration-corrected instruments installed, and two more planned in the near future to fill the 4-laboratory building. The installed JEOL 2200FS-AC has demonstrated a TEM information limit of 0.9A. This limit is expected given the measured instrument parameters (HT and OL power supply stabilities, beam energy spread, etc.), and illustrates that the environmental influences are not adversely affecting the instrument performance. In STEM high-angle annular dark-field (HA-ADF) mode, images of a thin Si crystal in zone axis orientation, after primary aberrations in the illuminating beam were optimally corrected, showed a significant vibration effect. The microscope is fitted with three magnetically levitated turbo pumps (one on the column at about the specimen position, and two near floor level) that pump the Omega energy filter and detector chamber. These pumps run at 48,000 rpm, precisely equivalent to 800Hz. It was determined that the upper turbo pump was contributing essentially all of the 800Hz signal to the image, and in fact that the pump was defective. After replacing the pump with one significantly quieter than the original, the Si atomic column image and associated diffractogram (Fig. 4b) show a much-reduced effect of the 800Hz signal, but still some residual effect from the turbo pump. The upper pump will be removed from the main column to an adjacent frame on the floor, and will have a large-diameter, well-damped, pump line to the original connection to the column to effectively isolate the pump from the column. If the 800Hz signal results from mechanical vibrations, they will be damped, and if the signal results from acoustic coupling to the column, it can be damped by appropriate acoustic materials.