From Beam Damage\nto Massive Reaction Amplification\nunder the Electron Microscope: An Ionization-Induced Chain Reaction\nin Crystals of a Dewar Benzene

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