Development of Field Emission Gun for High Voltage Electron Microscope
For the last few years we have been developing a field emission (FE) gun system for our high voltage electron microscope (HVEM) H-1250 ST (maximum accelerating voltage of 1.25 MV) at Nagoya University, in order to attain much higher level of performance of the instrument and to exploit further extended field of application. In the first stage of the project during the period from 1986 to 1987, the FE gun system had been mounted on the top of the accelerating tube, and successfully been operated at the accelerating voltage of 1 MV for the first time pin the world. The operation was very stable and high resolution images for both scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) and conventional transmission electron microscopy (CTEM) modes were possible at this stage. At the same time, however, several practical problems related to incorporating the FE gun into the HVEM were made clear. Since then several important modifications on instrumentation and electronics have been made and the project is now at the second stage. In this paper a brief outline of the FE gun system developed for our HVEM is described especially from the view point of instrumentation and electronics.