Advantages of low beam energies in a TEM for valence EELS

Since the availability of monochromators in transmission electron microscopes (TEMs), electron energy loss spectrometry (EELS) is widely used to determine band gaps and the dielectric properties of semiconductors on a nano-metre scale. Nevertheless, three physical effects hamper straightforward analysis: (a) relativistic energy losses, (b) the delocalization of the energy loss which is in the 10 nano-metreer range for valence losses, and (c) the presence of interface plasmons. When reducing the operation voltage of the TEM one can kill two birds with one stone: (a) the relativistic losses will disappear as soon as ve<c0/n(with ve as the speed of the electron, c0 as the vacuum speed of light and n as the refractive index of the investigated sample) and (b) the delocalization will decrease, because it also depends on the energy of the incident electron probe. The determination of the optical properties of quantum structures is discussed in the case of GaP/GaAs interface at 200 keV and 20 keV beam energy, respectively. Further, the influence of the delocalization of the energy loss signal is discussed theoretically and experimentally.