Hello. I'm Roberto Garcia. I'm a lab manager at the Analytical Instrumentation Facility at NC State University, part of the Research Triangle Nanotechnology Network. In this video, you will learn how to perform an energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy experiment or EDS experiment on a sample. Make sure your sample is prepared appropriately on a compatible mount for your electron microscope. Today, we're going to identify elements present in a piece of stainless steel. Our sample is mounted on a Hitachi screw mount using double-sided carbon tape. Using gloves to handle your sample, place the mount on the stage. It needs to be secured enough to make sure that the mount won't slip off the stage if we want to tilt the sample inside the chamber. Today, we will be performing our EDS experiment on a Hitachi S3200 variable-pressure scanning electron microscope, or SEM. First, we vent the chamber so we can open it and put our sample inside. After the chamber has vented, the sample can be loaded. Place the sample securely onto the stage. Carefully slide the sample back into the chamber and pump it back under vacuum. Once the chamber reaches appropriate pressure, turn on the high voltage, or HV, to turn on the electron beam. Adjust brightness and contrast until the sample is visible. Find the region of interest and bring it into focus at your desired magnification and working distance. Working distance is the distance between the sample and the pole piece or the beam exits the electron column. The optimal working distance for EDS experiments will be different for each different microscope. It is critical to focus and align the beam at this working distance for a good EDS experiment. For our setup, working distance should be around 18 millimeters. Now that we have our region of interest and focus at optimal working distance, we are ready to perform our EDS experiment. To start our experiment, we must insert the X-ray detector or EDS detector. Detectors may be inserted manually or automatically through the EDS software. Once the detector is inserted, we open up the EDS analysis software. The one we use on this microscope is called Revolution. Now, we begin our scan to collect signal from a region of interest. We can scan the entire region in view and get an idea of all elements present in our image. A spectrum begins to form. This is a live feed of the software counting X-rays at different energies. We can match these spectral fingerprints to a database to identify the elements present and cycle through all elements on the periodic table. Once the bars line up with our peaks, we can be confident that the element is present. From these peaks, it looks like we have some nickel, iron, and chromium in our sample. We can also collect signal from a very specific region or feature using localized signal collections like line scans or smaller area scans. Let's try a small area scan on this region here. Draw a box around the region of interest. Now, the software will collect signal from this area alone. These types of localized scans are useful for determining the composition of a particular feature. Some samples may have a varying elemental compositions in different areas. Since we have identified the elements present in our region of interest, our experiment is complete. We can turn the beam off and remove our sample now. Retract the EDS detector, vent the chamber, remove the sample from the chamber, finally, close the chamber and pump back under vacuum. We are now done with our EDS experiment. Because EDS is a non-destructive technique, we can save our sample and come back any time to replicate our experiment or try other conditions.