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Pattern Center and Distortion Determined from Faint, Diffuse Electron Diffraction Rings from Amorphous Materials

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2017

János L. Lábár Open the ORCID record for János L. Lábár [Opens in a new window]  and
Partha P. Das
János L. Lábár*
Affiliation:
Centre for Energy Research, Institute of Technical Physics and Materials Science, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, H-1121 Budapest, Konkoly-Thege M. u. 29-33, Hungary
Partha P. Das
Affiliation:
Electron Crystallography Solutions, Orense 8, 28032 Madrid, Spain
*
*Corresponding author.labar.janos@energia.mta.hu
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Abstract

Diffuse rings from amorphous materials sit on a steep background resulting in a monotonically decreasing intensity over scattering vector length, frequently with no clear local maximum that could be used to determine the center of the ring. The novelty of the method reported here is that it successful processes such weak patterns. It is based on separating the angular dependence of the positions of the maxima on the azimuthal angle in the measured two-dimensional pattern for a manually preselected peak. Both pattern center and elliptical distortion are simultaneously refined from this angular dependence. Both steps are based on nonlinear least square fitting, using the Levenberg–Marquardt method. It can be successfully applied to any amorphous patterns provided they were recorded with experimental conditions that facilitate dividing them into sectors with acceptable statistics. Patterns with the center shifted to the camera corner (recording a quadrant of a ring) can also be reliably evaluated, keeping precalibrated values of the elliptical distortion fixed during the fit. Finally, the limited number of counts in any pattern is overcome by cumulating many patterns (from equivalent areas) into a single pattern. Eliminating false effects is facilitated by masking out unwanted parts of any recorded pattern from processing.

Keywords

TEMthin filmscomputer programpartial patternsamorphous materials
Type
Instrumentation and Software
Information
Microscopy and Microanalysis , Volume 23 , Issue 3 , June 2017 , pp. 647 - 660
Copyright
© Microscopy Society of America 2017 

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