The development of a new windowless XEDS detector

A new windowless X-ray energy-dispersive spectroscopy (XEDS) detector has been developed for an analytical electron microscope (AEM). Different from the conventional XEDS detectors, the new detector does not contain an ultra-thin window (UTW) and a vacuum gate valve which are the major causes of low X-ray detection sensitivity and vibration problems for AEM imaging, respectively. The performance of the newly designed detector was examined at an AEM column vacuum level of 10(-5) Pa. The X-ray detectability was improved considerably; in particular, the sensitivity for detecting nitrogen characteristic X-ray signal was three times higher than that of the conventional UTW detectors.