History
The technique was developed by James Hillier and RF Baker in the mid 1940s but was not widely used over the next 50 years, only becoming more widespread in research in the 1990s due to advances in microscope instrumentation and vacuum technology. With modern instrumentation becoming widely available in laboratories worldwide, the technical and scientific developments from the mid 1990s have been rapid. The technique is able to take advantage of modern aberration-corrected probe forming systems to attain spatial resolutions down to ~0.1 nm, while with a monochromated electron source and/or careful deconvolution the energy resolution can be 100 meV or better. This has enabled detailed measurements of the atomic and electronic properties of single columns of atoms, and in a few cases, of single atoms.
Read more about this topic: Electron Energy Loss Spectroscopy
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