1924 - Louis de Broglie in his PhD thesis Recherches sur la théorie des quanta[1] introduced his theory of electron waves. This was the start of electron and neutron diffraction and crystallography.
1927 - Two groups demonstrated electron diffraction, the first the Davisson–Germer experiment,[2][3][4][5], the other by George Paget Thomson and Alexander Reid.[6] Alexander Reid, who was Thomson's graduate student, performed the first experiments,[7] but he died soon after in a motorcycle accident.[8]
1928 - Hans Bethe published the first non-relativistic explanation of electron diffraction based upon Schrödinger's equation, which remains central to all further analysis.[9]
1932 - Vadim E. Lashkaryov and Ilya D. Usyskin determined of the positions of hydrogen atoms in NH4Cl crystals using electron diffraction,[12]
1936 - Peter Debye won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his contributions to our knowledge of molecular structure through his investigations on dipole moments and on the diffraction of X-rays and electrons in gases."[13]
1968 - Aaron Klug and David DeRosier used electron microscopy to visualise the structure of the tail of bacteriophage T4, a common virus, thus signalling a breakthrough in macromolecular structure determination.[28]
1972 - The first quantitative matching of atomic scale images and dynamical simulations was published by J. G. Allpress, E. A. Hewat, A. F. Moodie and J. V. Sanders.[30]
1982 - Aaron Klug won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes.”[31]
1984 - A team led by Dan Shechtman also involving Ilan Blech, Denis Gratias, and John W. Cahn discovered quasicrystals in a metallic alloy. These structures have no unit cell and no periodic translational order but have long-range bond orientational order, which generates a defined diffraction pattern.[35]
1985 - Kunio Takanayagi led a team which solved the structure of the 7x7 reconstruction of the silicon (111) surface using Patterson function methods with ultra-high vacuumelectron diffraction.[36][37] This surface structure had defeated many prior attempts.
1986 - Ernst Ruska shared the Nobel Prize in Physics "for his fundamental work in electron optics, and for the design of the first electron microscope".[38]
1987 - John M. Cowley and Alexander F. Moodie shared the first IUCrEwald Prize "for their outstanding achievements in electron diffraction and microscopy. They carried out pioneering work on the dynamical scattering of electrons and the direct imaging of crystal structures and structure defects by high-resolution electron microscopy. The physical optics approach used by Cowley and Moodie takes into account many hundreds of scattered beams, and represents a far-reaching extension of the dynamical theory for X-rays, first developed by P.P. Ewald".[39]
1991 - Sumio Iijima used electron diffraction to determine the structure of carbon nanotubes.[40]
1992 - The International Union of Crystallography changed the IUCr’s definition of a crystal to “any solid having an essentially discrete diffraction pattern” thus formally recognizing quasicrystals.[41]
2007 - Ute Kolb and co-workers developed automated diffraction tomography for electron crystallography by combining diffraction and tomography within a transmission electron microscope.[47][48][49]
2011 - Gustaaf Van Tendeloo led a team including Sandra Van Aert, Kees Joost Batenburg et. al. determined the 3D atomic positions of a silver nanoparticle using electron tomography.[50]
2017 - Lukas Palatinus and co-workers used dynamical structure refinement to resolve hydrogen atom positions in nanocrystals using electron diffraction.[55][56]
^de Broglie, Louis Victor. "On the Theory of Quanta"(PDF). Foundation of Louis de Broglie (English translation by A.F. Kracklauer, 2004. ed.). Retrieved 25 February 2023.
^Mark, Herman; Wiel, Raymond (1930). "Die ermittlung von molekülstrukturen durch beugung von elektronen an einem dampfstrahl". Zeitschrift für Elektrochemie und angewandte physikalische Chemie. 36 (9): 675–676. doi:10.1002/bbpc.19300360921. S2CID178706417.
^Goodman, P.; Lehmpfuhl, G. (1968). "Observation of the breakdown of Friedel's law in electron diffraction and symmetry determination from zero-layer interactions". Acta Crystallographica Section A. 24 (3): 339–347. Bibcode:1968AcCrA..24..339G. doi:10.1107/S0567739468000677.
^Shechtman, D.; Blech, I.; Gratias, D.; Cahn, J. W. (1984). "Metallic Phase with Long-Range Orientational Order and No Translational Symmetry". Physical Review Letters. 53 (20): 1951–1953. Bibcode:1984PhRvL..53.1951S. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.53.1951.
^Miao, Jianwei; Ercius, Peter; Billinge, Simon J. L. (2016). "Atomic electron tomography: 3D structures without crystals". Science. 353 (6306). doi:10.1126/science.aaf2157. PMID27708010.
