Intrinsic Instability of Aberration-Corrected Electron Microscopes

TL;DR

Aberration-corrected electron microscopes with higher resolution are intrinsically unstable, limiting their practical performance unless advanced control systems are implemented to mitigate this fundamental instability.

Contribution

This work reveals the intrinsic instability of high-quality aberration correction in electron microscopes and introduces an 'instability budget' for balancing resolution and stability.

Findings

Corrected state lifetime is only a few minutes.

Higher quality correction correlates with increased instability.

Intrinsic instability sets a fundamental limit on achievable resolution.

Abstract

Aberration-corrected microscopes with sub-atomic resolution will impact broad areas of science and technology. However, the experimentally observed lifetime of the corrected state is just a few minutes. Here we show that the corrected state is intrinsically unstable; the higher its quality, the more unstable it is. Analyzing the Contrast Transfer Function near optimum correction, we define an 'instability budget' which allows a rational trade-off between resolution and stability. Unless control systems are developed to overcome these challenges, intrinsic instability poses a fundamental limit to the resolution practically achievable in the electron microscope.