Increasing Spatial Fidelity and SNR of 4D-STEM using Multi-frame Data Fusion

Abstract

4D-STEM, in which the 2D diffraction plane is captured for each 2D scan position in the scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) using a pixelated detector, is complementing and increasingly replacing existing imaging approaches. However, at present the speed of those detectors, although having drastically improved in the recent years, is still 100 to 1,000 times slower than the current PMT technology operators are used to. Regrettably, this means environmental scanning-distortion often limits the overall performance of the recorded 4D data. Here we present an extension of existing STEM distortion correction techniques for the treatment of 4D-data series. Although applicable to 4D-data in general, we use electron ptychography and electric-field mapping as model cases and demonstrate an improvement in spatial-fidelity, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), phase-precision and spatial-resolution.

References in corpus (3)

• Optimized imaging using non-rigid registration
• Overcoming information reduced data and experimentally uncertain parameters in ptychography with regularized optimization
• Fast Pixelated Detectors in Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy. Part II: Post Acquisition Data Processing, Visualisation, and Structural Characterisation

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Factors limiting quantitative phase retrieval in atomic-resolution differential phase contrast scanning transmission electron microscopy using a segmented detector