Using Energy-Filtered 4D-STEM to Measure Structure and Properties of Materials

The past decade of development for scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) has been enormously successful in materials science studies. This growth has been driven primarily by technological innovations, including hardware aberration correction, the rise of computational imaging and automated data analysis, and the widespread adoption of direct electron detectors. At the forefront of this progress are four-dimensional (4D)-STEM experiments, where a full 2D image of the electron beam can be measured over a 2D grid of probe positions. The speed of direct electron detectors has enabled these experiments to measure phase, orientation, local deformation, order parameters, atomic structure, and other material properties. 4D-STEM measurements can benefit from energy-filtering, so the diffraction patterns contain only elastically scattered electrons. This filtering removes unwanted background signals in momentum-resolved 4D-STEM measurements, such as plasmon and core-loss scattering. In this talk, we will show various examples of energy-filtered 4D-STEM experiments enabled by the eaSI technology leveraging STEMx system, K3 direct detection camera and GIF Continuum, for low-resolution property mapping and high-resolution structural determination. Presenters: Colin Ophus and Stephanie Ribet, NCEM Ana Pakzad, Gatan