Meeting Abstract
There has been significant progress in recent years aimed at pushing the spatial resolution limit of scanning electron microscopes. Many of these endeavors have been driven by advances in the field of nanotechnology and the need to investigate the morphological features of sub-micron size materials. While scanning electron microscopy is indeed a powerful tool for investigating objects at length-scales that are prohibitive using standard optical microscopy techniques, SEMs are also extremely useful in characterizing the micro- and macro-scale architectures of transparent, highly reflective, or morphologically complex materials. In this present study, three scanning-electron microscopy imaging techniques (wide-field, polychromatic, and stereo) will be introduced and applied to the imaging of a wide range of hierarchical biological and synthetic structural materials across length scales covering more than 5 orders of magnitude (less than 10 μm to greater than 10 cm).
