A working transmission electron microscope. Every detector image is computed from the physics: an electron wave passing through a real arrangement of atoms. Click any label on the column for the instrument physics behind it.
What you are looking at
About this exhibit
How to drive it
Click a label on the column to open its instrument-physics card: how it works, typical specifications, how it is calibrated, and live values.
Drag the 3D column to orbit, scroll to zoom. Keys 1–9 and 0 switch modes, Space pauses, L labels, C clarity, R resets the view, N turns narration on or off.
Control panel: press V for the on-screen console and drive the microscope from the keyboard (Q/W focus, A/S magnification, Z/X intensity, H/L and K/J multifunction knobs, arrows for the stage, Tab to switch the multifunction knobs between stigmator, image shift and tilt), or drag and scroll its knobs; pop it out to a second window. Or plug in a TEM-view panel or a game controller and press a button. Knobs and sticks drive focus, magnification, intensity, the stigmator and the stage; the gamepad icon in the Controls header shows live input and lets you remap everything.
Results panel: the buttons at its top right enlarge it in place (X, Esc to close) or open it in a separate window, for example on a second screen.
Drag the detector image to move the specimen stage; scroll it to change magnification. In diffraction, dragging the pattern tilts the crystal. Try to find the zone axis by following the Kikuchi lines.
4D-STEM: hover the virtual image to read individual diffraction patterns; drag on the pattern to reshape the virtual detector.
EDS: click a peak to map that element. EELS: drag on the spectrum to move the energy window; choose the dispersion (eV per channel) and energy offset, or the Zero-loss preset to see the instrument's energy resolution. Lengthen the exposure until the zero loss saturates (red), then switch on Dual EELS to record the low loss and the core loss together.
Acquire (camera button above the detector, or I) records an exposure into the acquisitions gallery, to download as PNG or data.
Ronchigram: press Scramble, then null the aberrations with the sliders (watch the π/4 circle grow), or press Auto-tune. CBED: thicken the sample to read thickness from the fringes; drag strain to move HOLZ lines.
Digital twin (bottom of the controls): choose or edit an instrument profile, then calibrate it from your own data in any mode: Thon rings (TEM), a crystal lattice (magnification, STEM scan distortion), a ring standard (camera length, ellipticity), a vacuum disk (4D-STEM angles), known EDS peaks, the EELS zero-loss peak, or a vacuum hologram. Save and load sessions, and export the recorded data as NumPy .npz.
Proteins in ice: try TEM at −1.5 µm defocus, then move to focus and select the Zernike phase plate. Warm the cryo holder past 140 K and then 170 K to see the ice crystallize and then sublime.
Temperature: choose a holder (liquid nitrogen, liquid helium down to ~10 K, or a heating chip up to 1200 °C) and set the temperature. Watch radiolysis, atomic vibrations, thermal expansion (CBED HOLZ lines), ice, contamination and drift respond.
Holography: in off-axis mode, raise the biprism voltage for finer fringes and watch the contrast and phase precision fall; switch between hologram, phase and phase contours. In in-line mode, widen the focal step to recover large, slowly varying features.
What is computed, and how
The specimens are built from real structures: Au nanoparticles (FCC, [110]) on amorphous carbon; Si [110] against amorphous SiO₂; a SrTiO₃ Σ5 (310) tilt boundary; graphene with defects; the metal–organic framework UiO-66 along [110]; and apoferritin, ferritin and a lipid vesicle in vitreous ice, whose projected potential comes from exact chord lengths through spheres and shells. The crystals' projected potential is built atom by atom.
TEM and diffraction treat the specimen as a phase object, then apply the full objective-lens transfer function: defocus, Cs, aperture, and temporal and spatial coherence envelopes. STEM convolves the aberrated probe with a Zn scattering map. 4D-STEM computes a real convergent-beam pattern (probe × transmission function, then FFT) at each of 1,600 probe positions. EDS uses real line energies, a Fano-limited detector response and Kramers bremsstrahlung. EELS uses Drude plasmons with Poisson plural scattering and real edge onsets. The Ronchigram is |FFT(probe × amorphous film)|² with the full axial aberration function. CBED/LACBED use two-beam dynamical theory per reflection with 3D structure factors and exact HOLZ geometry. Off-axis holography interferes the aberrated image wave with a tilted plane reference wave, then reconstructs it by sideband filtering; in-line holography simulates a focal series through the same transfer function and recovers the exit wave iteratively.
Simplifications: thick-crystal dynamical scattering (channeling) is approximated by a saturating phase rather than full multislice, and cross-sections are schematic. Trends and length scales are right; absolute intensities are illustrative.