Reconstruction of the projected electrostatic potential in high-resolution transmission electron microscopy including phenomenological absorption

The projected electrostatic potential is reconstructed from a high-resolution exit wave function through a maximum-likelihood refinement algorithm. The theory of an already existing algorithm [1] is extended to include the effects of phenomenological absorption. Various tests with a simulated exit wave function of YBa2Cu3O7 in [1 0 0] orientation used as a source show that the reconstruction is successful, regardless of the strongly differing scattering power of atomic columns, even for the case of strong dynamical diffraction. Object thickness, the amount of absorption, and a residual defocus aberration of the wave function—parameters often unknown or difficult to measure in experiments—can be determined accurately with the aid of the refinement algorithm in a self-consistent way. For the next generation of instruments, with information limits of 0.05 nm and better, reconstruction accuracies of better than 2% can be expected, which is sufficient to measure and display the structural and chemical information with the aid of an accurate projected potential map.