Reconstructing the Scattering Matrix from Scanning Electron Diffraction Measurements Alone

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel algorithm that reconstructs the scattering matrix from scanning electron diffraction measurements, enabling high-resolution 3D imaging and material characterization without wavefront shaping optics.

Contribution

The work presents a new scattering matrix-based algorithm to recover scattering properties and illumination aberrations from intensity-only measurements in electron microscopy.

Findings

Successfully reconstructs scattering matrices from diffraction data.

Enables high-resolution 3D imaging of non-crystalline materials.

Provides a method to recover illumination aberrations.

Abstract

Three-dimensional phase contrast imaging of multiply-scattering samples in X-ray and electron microscopy is extremely challenging, due to small numerical apertures, the unavailability of wavefront shaping optics, and the highly nonlinear inversion required from intensity-only measurements. In this work, we present a new algorithm using the scattering matrix formalism to solve the scattering from a non-crystalline medium from scanning diffraction measurements, and recover the illumination aberrations. Our method will enable 3D imaging and materials characterization at high resolution for a wide range of materials.