Abstract
We present a novel method to determine the projected atomic potential of a specimen directly from transmission electron microscopy coherent electron nano-diffraction patterns, overcoming common limitations encountered so far due to the dynamical nature of electron-matter interaction. The projected potential is obtained by deconvolution of the inverse Fourier transform of experimental diffraction patterns rescaled in intensity by using theoretical values of the kinematical atomic scattering factors. This novelty enables the compensation of dynamical effects typical of transmission electron microscopy (TEM) experiments on standard specimens with thicknesses up to a few tens of nm. The projected atomic potentials so obtained are averaged on sample regions illuminated by nano-sized electron probes and are in good quantitative agreement with theoretical expectations. Contrary to lens-based microscopy, here the spatial resolution in the retrieved projected atomic potential profiles is related to the finer lattice spacing measured in the electron diffraction pattern. The method has been successfully applied to experimental nano-diffraction data of crystalline centrosymmetric and non-centrosymmetric specimens achieving a resolution of 65 pm.
Highlights
Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) represents a powerful tool to investigate the properties of matter at very high spatial resolution [1,2]
The microscope has a resolution at optimum defocus in High resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) of 190 pm [7]
We have presented experimental results and data analysis based on: (i) preparation of a coherent coherent nano-beam of 200 kV electrons and measurement of a complete nano-beam of 200 kV electrons and measurement of a complete coherent coherent diffraction pattern from a nano-region of extended samples, satisfying the diffraction pattern from a nano-region of extended samples, satisfying the Nyquist-Shannon sampling
Summary
Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) represents a powerful tool to investigate the properties of matter at very high spatial resolution [1,2]. The quality of the TEM electron lenses worsened mainly by spherical and chromatic aberrations, reduces the spatial resolution of about two orders of magnitude with respect to the diffraction limit [1]. The coherent Electron Diffractive Imaging (EDI) has demonstrated interesting performances in improving the HRTEM resolution [5,6,7] achieving so far 70 pm in a non-aberration corrected TEM, revealing fundamental material properties not detectable in the HRTEM images [7]. Through a lens-less imaging method, from the inverse Fourier
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