Multi-angle precession electron diffraction (MAPED): a versatile approach to 4D-STEM precession

Abstract: Precession of a converged beam during acquisition of a 4D-STEM dataset improves strain, orientation, and phase mapping accuracy by averaging over continuous angles of illumination. Precession experiments usually rely on integrated systems, where automatic alignments lead to fast, high-quality results. The dependence of these experiments on specific hardware and software is evident even when switching to non-integrated detectors on a precession tool, as experimental set-up becomes challenging and time-consuming. Here, we introduce multi-angle precession electron diffraction (MAPED): a method to perform precession electron diffraction by collecting sequential 4D-STEM scans at different incident beam tilts. The multiple diffraction datasets are averaged together post-acquisition, resulting in a single dataset that minimizes the impact of the curvature and orientation of the Ewald sphere relative to the crystal under study. Our results demonstrate that even four additional tilts improved measurement of material properties, namely strain and orientation, as compared to single-tilt 4D-STEM experiments. We show the versatility and flexibility of our few-tilt precession approach with data collected on a number of microscopes with different hardware configurations and a variety of detectors.