Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Electron lens aberration is the major barrier limiting the resolution of electron microscopy. Here we describe a novel form of electron microscopy to overcome electron lens aberration. By combining coherent electron diffraction with the oversampling phasing method, we show that the 3D structure of a 2 x 2 x 2 unit cell nano-crystal (framework of LTA [Al12Si12O48]8) can be ab initio determined at the resolution of 1 Angstrom from a series of simulated noisy diffraction pattern projections with rotation angles ranging from -70 degrees to +70 degrees in 5 degrees increments along a single rotation axis. This form of microscopy (which we call 3D electron diffraction microscopy) does not require any reference waves, and can image the 3D structure of nanocrystals, as well as non-crystalline biological and materials science samples, withthe resolution limited only by the quality of sample diffraction.