From Beam Damage to Massive Reaction Amplification under the Electron Microscope: An Ionization-Induced Chain Reaction in Crystals of a Dewar Benzene

Abstract

Electron microscopy in its various forms is one of the most powerful imaging and structural elucidation methods in nanotechnology where sample information is generally limited by random chemical and structural damage. Here we show how a well-selected chemical probe can be used to transform indiscriminate chemical damage into clean chemical processes that can be used to characterize some aspects of the interactions between high-energy electron beams and soft organic matter. Crystals of a Dewar benzene exposed to a 300 keV electron beam facilitate a clean valence-bond isomerization radical-cation chain reaction where the number of chemical events per incident electron is amplified by a factor of up to ca. 90,000.

A crystalline Dewar benzene undergoes up to 90,000 reactions per incident electron, rapidly losing diffraction and massively amplifying the effects of ionization in microelectron diffraction.