A small electron probe has many applications in many fields and in the case of the STEM, the probe size essentially determines the ultimate resolution. However, there are many difficulties in obtaining a very small probe.Spherical aberration is one of them and all existing probe forming systems have non-zero spherical aberration. The ultimate probe radius is given byδ = 0.43Csl/4ƛ3/4where ƛ is the electron wave length and it is apparent that δ decreases only slowly with decreasing Cs. Scherzer pointed out that the third order aberration coefficient always has the same sign regardless of the field distribution, provided only that the fields have cylindrical symmetry, are independent of time and no space charge is present. To overcome this problem, he proposed a corrector consisting of octupoles and quadrupoles.
