260197 VO Guest lecture (2008S)

This short course intends to give a (non-exhaustive) overview of some modern techniques of microscopy available for the characterisation of materials at different length scales with the aim of giving some insight in the working principles of the techniques and their potential applications and possible fields of study. After an introduction in which different aspects of imaging such as probes and aberrations are discussed, first some typical optical techniques are reviewed including polarization and fluorescence microscopy, confocal microscopy, X-ray microscopy and different near field techniques. After a short chapter on field emission and field ion microscopy, different variants of scanning probe microscopy are reviewed. The part on electron microscopy starts with a chapter on scanning electron microscopy including focused ion beam, with the bulk of the course focusing on different techniques, conventional as well as advanced, of transmission electron microscopy including spectroscopy and diffraction.