The 4D Camera: an 87 kHz direct electron detector for scanning/transmission electron microscopy

Abstract

We describe the development, operation, and application of the 4D Camera -- a 576 by 576 pixel active pixel sensor for scanning/transmission electron microscopy which operates at 87,000 Hz. The detector generates data at approximately 480 Gbit/s which is captured by dedicated receiver computers with a parallelized software infrastructure that has been implemented to process the resulting 10 - 700 Gigabyte-sized raw datasets. The back illuminated detector provides the ability to detect single electron events at accelerating voltages from 30 - 300 keV. Through electron counting, the resulting sparse data sets are reduced in size by 10 - 300x compared to the raw data, and open-source sparsity-based processing algorithms offer rapid data analysis. The high frame rate allows for large and complex 4D-STEM experiments to be accomplished with typical STEM scanning parameters.

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Cited by in corpus (3)

• PtyRAD: A High-performance and Flexible Ptychographic Reconstruction Framework with Automatic Differentiation
• Advanced Techniques in Automated High Resolution Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy
• Removing constraints of 4D-STEM with a framework for event-driven acquisition and processing