Specimen Preparation

Specimen preparation is a very broad subject; there are books devoted to this topic alone. The intention here is to summarize the techniques, suggest routes that you might follow, and above all to emphasize that there are many ways to produce a TEM specimen; the one you choose will depend on the information you need, time constraints, availability of equipment, your skill, and the material. So we’ll concentrate on the ‘principles of cooking,’ but won’t try to list all the possible ‘recipes.’ One important point to bear in mind is that your technique must not affect what you see or measure, or if it does, then you must know how. Specimen preparation artifacts may be interesting but they are not usually what you want to study. Incidentally, we’ll make ‘specimens’ from the ‘sample’ we’re investigating so we’ll look at ‘TEM specimens,’ but sometimes we, and everyone else, will interchange the two words.