Electron ptychography is an imaging technique that uses electrons instead of photons, and it has a number of advantages over traditional optical microscopy. It can be used to image very small objects, such as viruses or nanoparticles, with a high degree of resolution. Additionally, electron ptychography is not limited by the diffraction limit like optical microscopy is, so it can achieve sub-angstrom resolutions. This makes it an ideal tool for studying nanostructures and other extremely small features.
Traditional optical microscopes are limited in their ability to image small objects due to the diffraction limit, which dictates that the smallest feature that can be resolved is about half the wavelength of light used to illuminate the sample. This means that even with state-of-the-art optics, the best optical microscopes can only resolve features down to about 200 nm in size. In contrast, electron ptychography can potentially achieve resolutions below 1 angstrom (0.1 nm). This makes it an invaluable tool for studying nanostructures and other tiny features.
In addition to its exceptional spatial resolution, electron ptychography also offers a number of other advantages over traditional optical microscopy. For example, because electrons interact strongly with matter, they can penetrate much thicker samples than photons can without significant loss of signal intensity. This makes electron ptychography well suited for imaging thick biological specimens or materials with high atomic densities (such as metals). Additionally, electrons do not suffer from scattering in the same way that photons do; this means that images acquired using electron ptychography are typically free from aberrations caused by light scatter. Finally, because electrons travel much faster than photons do (they have a speed approximately one million times greater), they can be used to capture rapid processes or dynamics taking place at the nanoscale level