From Beam Damage to Massive Reaction Amplification under the Electron Microscope: An Ionization-Induced Chain Reaction in Crystals of a Dewar Benzene

Electron microscopy
in its various forms is one of the
most powerful
imaging and structural elucidation methods in nanotechnology where
sample information is generally limited by random chemical and structural
damage. Here we show how a well-selected chemical probe can be used
to transform indiscriminate chemical damage into clean chemical processes
that can be used to characterize some aspects of the interactions
between high-energy electron beams and soft organic matter. Crystals
of a Dewar benzene exposed to a 300 keV electron beam facilitate a
clean valence-bond isomerization radical-cation chain reaction where
the number of chemical events per incident electron is amplified by
a factor of up to ca. 90,000.