A fast and accurate computation method for reflective diffraction simulations

Abstract: We present a new computation method for simulating reflection high-energy electron diffraction and the total-reflection high-energy positron diffraction experiments. The two experiments are used commonly for the structural analysis of material surface. The present paper improves the conventional numerical method, the multi-slice method, for faster computation, since the present method avoids the matrix-eigenvalue solver for the computation of matrix exponentials and can adopt higher-order ordinary differential equation solvers. Moreover, we propose a high-performance implementation based on multi-thread parallelization and cache-reusable subroutines. In our tests, this new method performs up to 2,000 times faster than the conventional method.