Materials Characterization FIB-SEM Review
Mengjia Zhu
MSE 550 Materials Characterization
Focused ion beam-scanning electron microscopy (FIB-SEM) is a powerful characterization tool that has been used in materials science for decades, but has recently been gaining wider applications on biological tissues to produce 3D renderings of cells as well as organelle architecture and distribution. This is a combined microscopy of focused ion beam (FIB) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) that not only improves the poor resolution along the Z-axis of serial thin sections, but also enhances the throughput of electron tomography. Compared with other microscopy methods available to obtain similar information, the ease of sectioning and image acquisition and the minimized chance of error during image realignment make FIB-SEM a better technology. In this paper, the principles related to the physical basis and the instruments of the techniques are discussed. In addition, two recent cases regarding the application of FIB-SEM on the analysis of plant cells and chromosome interior are studied and compared. All the results show that this microscopy can provide decent 3D images and it is proved to be promising in the biological field.
