Equipment | McGill Electron Microscopy Research Group

Our equipment

Our research group has the chance to work on state-of-the-art equipment inside of the Wong Building, McGill University. Here is an overview of our "favorite toys":

SU-8230

The Hitachi SU - 8230 cold field FE-SEM has a resolution of 0.4 nm at 30 keV and 3 nm at 0.05 keV, giving incredible surface details. It is equipped with an Auto-Flash feature that performs a gentle flash every hour. As a result, the probe current drops only by 10% after 10 hours, giving higher signal to noise ratio and higher x-ray generation rate. The maximum probe current is 60 nA. This state of the art electron microscope has one secondary electron (SE) lower detector, one SE upper detector and one backscattered electron (BSE) top with energy filtration of BSE electrons, a five quadrant BSE detector, a STEM detector that works in bright field, an electron convertor that allows to use the SE lower detector for dark field STEM imaging. It has the new FlatQuad X-Max SDD EDS detector (Bruker Instrument) that is located below the pole piece with a solid angle of 1.2 Sr, giving a detectable x-ray count rate of 2 000 000 c/s.

To use this SEM or for any informations, please contact Prof. Gauvin via our contact page or via email.

SU-8000

The Hitachi SU - 8000 cold field FE-SEM has a resolution of 0.5 nm at 30 keV and 2 nm at 0.2 keV. It has one secondary electron (SE) lower detector, one SE upper detector and one backscattered electron (BSE) top with various modes of energy filtration, a five quadrant BSE detector, a STEM detector that works in bright field, an electron convertor that allows to use the SE lower detector for dark field STEM imaging, a 80 mm2 X-Max SDD EDS detector (Oxford Instrument) and the EBSD Nordlys II System (Oxford Instrument). The maximum probe current is 30 nA and this allows to perform quantitative x-ray microanalysis at low voltage and in the STEM mode.

To use this SEM or for any informations, please contact Prof. Gauvin via our contact page or via email.

From the department

SU-3500

The Hitachi SU – 3500 Variable Pressure Scanning Electron Microscope (VP-SEM) has a resolution of 3 nm at 30 keV and 7 nm at 3 keV in the vacuum mode. It is equipped with a 80 mm2 X-Max SDD EDS detector (Oxford Instrument) with the EBSD AztecHKL Advanced system with Nordlysnano (Oxford Instrument). The high probe current of this microscope, 1 μA with the software allows the automatic EDS-EBSD mapping to perform montage of all the region of a given specimen automatically at very high speed. The BSE detector allows to obtain a quantitative tree dimensional maps of the surface of a specimen, allowing to quantify complicated ans/or rough surfaces. The low vacuum mode allows characterizing non-conductive materials without coatings.

For more informations, please access this website.