• Applied Microscopy
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• v.39 no.1
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• pp.73-77
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• 2009

Contaminative artifacts such as carbonaceous materials on carbon-coated microgrids are unavoidable, which is induced by electron beam exposure inside electron microscopes. This phenomenon raise a source to produce confusing information to the samples investigated by analytical TEM, which should be alleviated as much as possible. As experimental precautions for reducing this unwanted effect, the use of $LN_2$ cooled anti-contaminator and pre-illumination of electron beam at low magnification can be helpful. Nevertheless, we should be cautious to set an illumination condition for microanalysis because the contaminative effect is dependent with the types of irradiation situations, which is well known to be a decisive factor for causing the carbonaceous artifacts. Accordingly, it is necessary that optimal illumination to minimize the contaminative effect should be selected for improving the accuracy of microanalysis. In this paper, we introduce the practical method to determine the optimal illumination condition by evaluating the contaminative effect as a function of instrumental spot size, which is directly linked with electron current density.