In silico Ptychography of Lithium-ion Cathode Materials from Subsampled 4-D STEM Data

TL;DR

This paper introduces a subsampling method for 4-D STEM data that reduces beam damage while maintaining high-quality phase image reconstruction, demonstrated on simulated lithium-ion cathode material data.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel subsampling approach for 4-D STEM that leverages data redundancy to recover high-quality images with significantly less data, reducing sample damage.

Findings

High-quality phase images reconstructed with 12.5% subsampling

Method effectively reduces beam damage in STEM imaging

Demonstrated on simulated LiMnO2 data

Abstract

High quality scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) data acquisition and analysis has become increasingly important due to the commercial demand for investigating the properties of complex materials such as battery cathodes; however, multidimensional techniques (such as 4-D STEM) which can improve resolution and sample information are ultimately limited by the beam-damage properties of the materials or the signal-to-noise ratio of the result. subsampling offers a solution to this problem by retaining high signal, but distributing the dose across the sample such that the damage can be reduced. It is for these reasons that we propose a method of subsampling for 4-D STEM, which can take advantage of the redundancy within said data to recover functionally identical results to the ground truth. We apply these ideas to a simulated 4-D STEM data set of a LiMnO2 sample and we obtained high quality reconstruction of phase images using 12.5% subsampling.