DE-16

The DE-16ER (extended range) sensor upgrade for the DE-16 camera is designed to allow you to use one direct detector for experiments across the entire voltage range of your TEM column.

In the past, monolithic active pixel sensor (MAPS) direct detectors for TEM were optimized to perform at their best in the 200 kV – 300 kV beam voltage range. At lower voltages, performance was often little better than that of a traditional scintillator-coupled camera. This was a design choice that all direct detector manufacturers made because the majority of customers, particularly those working in biological Cryo-EM, were using 200 – 300 kV electron microscopes for their experiments.

However, there has long been an interest in high performance detectors for lower electron beam voltages. In materials science, certain specimens such as 2D materials are vulnerable to knock-on displacement damage from the electron beam, but this may be avoided by working at a lower beam voltage such as 60 kV. In the biological sciences, some hope that developing electron microscopes and direct detectors optimized for 100 kV could make advanced techniques such as single particle Cryo-EM more accessible.

At Direct Electron, our development of MAPS direct detectors for low-voltage electron microscopy techniques such as LEEM/PEEM also led to our development of an extended voltage range sensor for TEM, allowing high-DQE direct detection imaging at beam voltages of 30 kV and above. Our “ER” sensor is available as an upgrade for the DE-16 camera.