Enabling Autonomous Electron Microscopy for Networked Computation and Steering

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel ecosystem for remote, automated control and measurement of electron microscopes, utilizing separate data and control channels, and demonstrates its effectiveness through virtual infrastructure twins for testing and deployment.

Contribution

It presents a new approach for remote steering and automation of electron microscopes using separate data/control channels and virtual infrastructure twins for testing and deployment.

Findings

Successful remote steering of Nion STEM instruments over networks

Development of Virtual Infrastructure Twins for testing software modules

Applicability demonstrated in multi-laboratory wide-area network scenarios

Abstract

Advanced electron microscopy workflows require an ecosystem of microscope instruments and computing systems possibly located at different sites to conduct remotely steered and automated experiments. Current workflow executions involve manual operations for steering and measurement tasks, which are typically performed from control workstations co-located with microscopes; consequently, their operational tempo and effectiveness are limited. We propose an approach based on separate data and control channels for such an ecosystem of Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopes (STEM) and computing systems, for which no general solutions presently exist, unlike the neutron and light source instruments. We demonstrate automated measurement transfers and remote steering of Nion STEM physical instruments over site networks. We propose a Virtual Infrastructure Twin (VIT) of this ecosystem, which is used to develop and test our steering software modules without requiring access to the physical instrument infrastructure. Additionally, we develop a VIT for a multiple laboratory scenario, which illustrates the applicability of this approach to ecosystems connected over wide-area networks, for the development and testing of software modules and their later field deployment.