About this site

The SEM Field Guide is a working reference for scanning electron microscopy — the craft of it. It is written for the person actually sitting at the microscope: the graduate student handed a login and a deadline, the QC tech who inherited "the SEM stuff," the engineer who needs one good image of one bad part, and the experienced operator who suspects, correctly, that their habits could use an audit.

The premise is that most SEM knowledge lives in an awkward gap. The textbooks are rigorous about physics and silent about the bench. The application notes are polished and perishable. The real craft — how to mount a powder so it stays put, when a coating is hiding your sample from you, why the image smears one way and then the other — gets passed hand to hand in labs, unevenly, and much of it never gets written down at all. This site writes it down.

Editorial rules

Three rules govern what gets published here. First, bench over brochure: every page should tell you what to do, in what order, and what it looks like when it goes wrong. Second, defaults with honesty: where practice varies between labs, the guide gives a defensible default and says plainly that it is one. Third, specificity without salesmanship: this site sells nothing, carries no advertising, and publishes no reviews or rankings. Where specific instruments or products are named, they appear as concrete examples because specificity is useful — not as endorsements.

Corrections

A field guide that can't be argued with is a liability. If a page here disagrees with your bench experience, the bench is presumed right until proven otherwise — and pages get amended when readers make the case. A public correction note accompanies any substantive fix.