Electron crystallography – an introduction

Everything in Nature, macroscopic or microscopic, inorganic, organic or biological, has its specific properties. Most properties of matter depend on the structures, and many techniques have been developed over the centuries for structure analysis. The greatest of them all, structure analysis of single crystals by X-ray diffraction, X-ray crystallography, was founded in 1912 and is still today the most important technique for studying microstructures of periodically ordered objects. Electron diffraction of single crystals was discovered fifteen years later and thereafter the wave property of electrons was exploited in the invention of the electron microscope. Since then, electron microscopes have been used in many fields as a tool for exploring and visualizing the microscopic world in all its beauty. Between the first blurred images and today’s sharp atomic resolution lies fifty years of untiring engineering. More recently, the unprecedented power of computers has made it possible to analyze quantitatively, and even further improve, these images. The amalgamation of electron diffraction and atomic resolution electron microscopy with crystallographic image processing has created a new powerful tool for structure analysis electron crystallography.