Electron beam precession for a serial crystallography experiment in a TEM

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Plana-Ruiz, Sergi, Lu, Penghan, Ummethala, Govind, Dunin-Borkowski, Rafal
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Plana-Ruiz, Sergi
Lu, Penghan
Ummethala, Govind
Dunin-Borkowski, Rafal
author_facet Plana-Ruiz, Sergi
Lu, Penghan
Ummethala, Govind
Dunin-Borkowski, Rafal
contents During the last few years, serial electron crystallography (Serial Electron Diffraction, SerialED) has been gaining attention for the structure determination of crystalline compounds that are sensitive to the irradiation of the electron beam. By recording a single electron diffraction pattern per crystal, indexing hundreds or even thousands of measured particles, and merging the reflection intensities of the successfully indexed patterns, one can retrieve crystal structure models with strongly mitigated beam damage contributions. However, one of the technique's bottlenecks is the need to collect that many diffraction patterns, which, done in an automated way, results in low indexing rates. This work demonstrates how to overcome this limitation by performing the serial crystallography experiment following a semi-automated routine with a precessed electron beam (Serial Precession Electron Diffraction, SerialPED). The precession movement increases the number of reflections present in the diffraction patterns and dynamical effects related to specific orientations of the crystals with respect to the electron beam are smoothed out. This leads to more uniform reflection intensities across the serial dataset and a smaller number of patterns are required to merge the reflection intensities for good statistics. Furthermore, structure refinements based on the dynamical diffraction theory become accessible, providing a novel approach for more accurate structure models. In this context, the use of beam precession is presented as an advantageous tool for serial electron crystallography as it enables reliable crystal structure analysis with a lower amount of diffraction data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_00962
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Electron beam precession for a serial crystallography experiment in a TEM
Plana-Ruiz, Sergi
Lu, Penghan
Ummethala, Govind
Dunin-Borkowski, Rafal
Materials Science
Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics
During the last few years, serial electron crystallography (Serial Electron Diffraction, SerialED) has been gaining attention for the structure determination of crystalline compounds that are sensitive to the irradiation of the electron beam. By recording a single electron diffraction pattern per crystal, indexing hundreds or even thousands of measured particles, and merging the reflection intensities of the successfully indexed patterns, one can retrieve crystal structure models with strongly mitigated beam damage contributions. However, one of the technique's bottlenecks is the need to collect that many diffraction patterns, which, done in an automated way, results in low indexing rates. This work demonstrates how to overcome this limitation by performing the serial crystallography experiment following a semi-automated routine with a precessed electron beam (Serial Precession Electron Diffraction, SerialPED). The precession movement increases the number of reflections present in the diffraction patterns and dynamical effects related to specific orientations of the crystals with respect to the electron beam are smoothed out. This leads to more uniform reflection intensities across the serial dataset and a smaller number of patterns are required to merge the reflection intensities for good statistics. Furthermore, structure refinements based on the dynamical diffraction theory become accessible, providing a novel approach for more accurate structure models. In this context, the use of beam precession is presented as an advantageous tool for serial electron crystallography as it enables reliable crystal structure analysis with a lower amount of diffraction data.
title Electron beam precession for a serial crystallography experiment in a TEM
topic Materials Science
Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.00962