Filtering Chromatic Aberration for Wide Acceptance Angle Electrostatic Lenses II--Experimental Evaluation and Software-Based Imaging Energy Analyzer.

Abstract

Here, the experimental results of the method of filtering the effect of chromatic aberration for wide acceptance angle electrostatic lens-based system are described. This method can eliminate the effect of chromatic aberration from the images of a measured spectral image sequence by determining and removing the effect of higher and lower kinetic energy electrons on each different energy image, which leads to significant improvement of image and spectral quality. The method is based on the numerical solution of a large system of linear equations and equivalent with a multivariate strongly nonlinear deconvolution method. A matrix whose elements describe the strongly nonlinear chromatic aberration-related transmission function of the lens system acts on the vector of the ordered pixels of the distortion free spectral image sequence, and produces the vector of the ordered pixels of the measured spectral image sequence. Since the method can be applied not only on 2D real- and $k$ -space diffraction images, but also along a third dimension of the image sequence that is along the optical or in the 3D parameter space, the energy axis, it functions as a software-based imaging energy analyzer (SBIEA). It can also be applied in cases of light or other type of optics for different optical aberrations and distortions. In case of electron optics, the SBIEA method makes possible the spectral imaging without the application of any other energy filter. It is notable that this method also eliminates the disturbing background significantly in the present investigated case of reflection electron energy loss spectra. It eliminates the instrumental effects and makes possible to measure the real physical processes better.