The last several decades have seen an explosion in the number of experimental techniques being developed to characterize materials. In particular, there has been exponential growth in the coupling of microscopic methods with conventional spectroscopic characterization tools. This has been due mainly to the renaissance in microscopy over the last quarter century and the advent of significant computational power “on a bench”.

Compositional imaging is just a new term for what was over a half century ago called “Chemical Microscopy”. Although then the term referred to optical microscopy, today the notion of compositional imaging refers to a method by which we can correlate chemical or elemental composition with a microscopic image feature.

Because many of these microcharacterization methods have developed from many different disciplines, the “local” language used often appears to be untranslatable from one technique to the next without considerable pain and difficulty.