Dave Mitchell's DigitalMicrograph™ Scripting Website

Function

Drives the beam tilts of a microscope to enable hollow cone, raster, arc and rocking scanning - as well as manual control.

Version

version:20160110, v1.0

Author

D. R. G. Mitchell

Acknowledgements

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Comments

There are a large number of potential uses of tilt scanning during TEM imaging. You may already have a hollow cone device on your microscope - if not this script provides one. Hollow cone enables dark field imaging but sampling a large annulus of diffraction space, rather than just that covered by an objective aperture in static dark field imaging. Raster scanning is particularly effective and averaging out bend contour contrast. This can obscure precipitate phases in bright field images. It also works very well at removing erroneous diffraction contrast from EFTEM images including thickness maps.

If you find interesting uses for this tool, especially some of the more obscure ones, such as arc and rocking scannning, please let the author know.

A detailed manual is provided which explains how to calibrate and operate the script.

System Requirements

Tested on GMS 1.83 running under XP and GMS 2.3 running under Windows 7. It should be compatible with most GMS versions. Not tested (or supported) on GMS 3 - but may work. This script will only work on modern TEMs which use ethernet communication between the microscope and the DM computer (eg JEOL: 1400, 2100, 2200, ARM; FEI: Technai, Osiris, Titan). Older microscopes which use serial communication (eg JEOL 2010/3010) are not supported.

Known Issues

This is a software implementation and so it is much slower than any hardware-based systems. Scan rates will be of the order of a few Hz, but given that typical exposure times for dark field/EFTEM images are many seconds this is not an issue.

The manual has detailed information on optimisation and troubleshooting.

Supported

Yes

Included Files

zip archive containing the script and a manual is provided.

Source Code