“…Rectification of non-periodical samples is unlikely as curvatures, gaps and features make every line scan unique. Regardless, even images of crystal lattices are prone to artifacts caused by beam damage, drift distortion and emission fluctuations 11 . Figure 3 Serpentine scan rectification procedure.…”
Section: Resultsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Yet, the exerted electron irradiation 7 is the main limiting factor to investigating radiation sensitive materials such as oxides 8 , organic hybrids materials 9 or biological specimens 10 . A further disadvantage of STEM is the relatively long image acquisition time (seconds), under typical pixel-by-pixel conditions, preventing fast in-situ observations, and the hindering of quantitative analysis as drift and scan distortions artifacts arise 11 .…”
Scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) provides structural analysis with sub-angstrom resolution. But the pixel-by-pixel scanning process is a limiting factor in acquiring high-speed data. Different strategies have been implemented to increase scanning speeds while at the same time minimizing beam damage via optimizing the scanning strategy. Here, we achieve the highest possible scanning speed by eliminating the image acquisition dead time induced by the beam flyback time combined with reducing the amount of scanning pixels via sparse imaging. A calibration procedure was developed to compensate for the hysteresis of the magnetic scan coils. A combination of sparse and serpentine scanning routines was tested for a crystalline thin film, gold nanoparticles, and in an in-situ liquid phase STEM experiment. Frame rates of 92, 23 and 5.8 s-1 were achieved for images of a width of 128, 256, and 512 pixels, respectively. The methods described here can be applied to single-particle tracking and analysis of radiation sensitive materials.
“…Rectification of non-periodical samples is unlikely as curvatures, gaps and features make every line scan unique. Regardless, even images of crystal lattices are prone to artifacts caused by beam damage, drift distortion and emission fluctuations 11 . Figure 3 Serpentine scan rectification procedure.…”
Section: Resultsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Yet, the exerted electron irradiation 7 is the main limiting factor to investigating radiation sensitive materials such as oxides 8 , organic hybrids materials 9 or biological specimens 10 . A further disadvantage of STEM is the relatively long image acquisition time (seconds), under typical pixel-by-pixel conditions, preventing fast in-situ observations, and the hindering of quantitative analysis as drift and scan distortions artifacts arise 11 .…”
Scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) provides structural analysis with sub-angstrom resolution. But the pixel-by-pixel scanning process is a limiting factor in acquiring high-speed data. Different strategies have been implemented to increase scanning speeds while at the same time minimizing beam damage via optimizing the scanning strategy. Here, we achieve the highest possible scanning speed by eliminating the image acquisition dead time induced by the beam flyback time combined with reducing the amount of scanning pixels via sparse imaging. A calibration procedure was developed to compensate for the hysteresis of the magnetic scan coils. A combination of sparse and serpentine scanning routines was tested for a crystalline thin film, gold nanoparticles, and in an in-situ liquid phase STEM experiment. Frame rates of 92, 23 and 5.8 s-1 were achieved for images of a width of 128, 256, and 512 pixels, respectively. The methods described here can be applied to single-particle tracking and analysis of radiation sensitive materials.
“…Several authors have created drift correction methods, including nonrigid or nonlinear ones such as SmartAlign by Jones et al (55) and SPmerge by Ophus et al (56). Other authors have implemented various drift correction algorithms for different STEM modalities (57)(58)(59).…”
Scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) is one of the most powerful characterization tools in materials science research. Due to instrumentation developments such as highly coherent electron sources, aberration correctors, and direct electron detectors, STEM experiments can examine the structure and properties of materials at length scales of functional devices and materials down to single atoms. STEM encompasses a wide array of flexible operating modes, including imaging, diffraction, spectroscopy, and 3D tomography experiments. This review outlines many common STEM experimental methods with a focus on quantitative data analysis and simulation methods, especially those enabled by open source software. The hope is to introduce both classic and new experimental methods to materials scientists and summarize recent progress in STEM characterization. The review also discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the various STEM methodologies and briefly considers promising future directions for quantitative STEM research. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Materials Research, Volume 53 is July 2023. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
“…For example, if the crystalline lattice parameters of a material are known, the linear drift can be removed from a single image. 224 In atomic-resolution images, it is also possible to directly track the measured position of atoms in a time series to estimate the undistorted configuration. [225][226][227][228] Finally, STEM is not restricted to recording square or rectangular scan patterns.…”
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