LAUSR

As an imaging technique, transmission electron microscopy (TEM) is distinguished by its ability to precisely locate the positions of individual atoms. In many cases, it can even identify these atoms’ elemental identities. However, while in principle such location and identification determines nearly all the properties of a sample, and in practice it serves as the key input to calculations (e.g. density functional theory) that can deduce these properties, standard TEM by itself is fundamentally blind to many properties of interest. For instance, standard TEM imaging does not distinguish between an insulator and a conductor, a distinction that can be made with the naked eye (at much lower resolution, of course).