Three-dimensional shapes and distribution of FePd nanoparticles observed by electron tomography using high-angle annular dark-field scanning transmission electron microscopy

Abstract

We have studied three-dimensional shapes and distribution of FePd nanoparticles, prepared by electron beam deposition and postdeposition annealing, by means of single-axis tilt tomography using atomic number contrasts obtained by high-angle annular dark-field scanning transmission electron microscopy. Particle size, shape, and locations were reconstructed by weighted backprojection (WBP), as well as by simultaneous iterative reconstruction technique (SIRT). We have also estimated the particle size by simple extrapolation of tilt-series original data sets, which proved to be quite powerful. The results of the two algorithms for reconstruction have been compared quantitatively with those obtained by the extrapolation method and those independently reported by electron holography. It was found that the reconstructed intensity map by WBP contains a small amount of dotlike artifacts, which do not exist in the results by SIRT, and that the particle surface obtained by WBP is rougher than that by SIRT. We demonstrate, on the other hand, that WBP yields a better estimation of the particle size in the z direction than SIRT does, most likely due to the presence of a “missing wedge” in the original data set.