smpr3d: an open-source toolkit for 3D phase-contrast imaging from 4D-STEM datasets

electron microscopy
imaging
Author

P. Pelz, H. Brown, P. Ercius, I. Johnson, J. Ciston, M. Scott, C. Ophus

Doi
Keywords

Phase contrast microscopy, Open source

Citation (APA 7)

smpr3d: an open-source toolkit for 3D phase-contrast imaging from 4D-STEM datasets P. Pelz, H. Brown, P. Ercius, I. Johnson, J. Ciston, M. Scott, C. Ophus Microscopy and Microanalysis 27, 1524-1526

Abstract

Most current phase-contrast reconstruction algorithms for 4D-STEM datasets, like differential phase contrast [1] and ptychography [2], assume and reconstruct a 2-dimensional image. Yet modern electron microscopes allow aberration-corrected imaging with numerical apertures that enable axial resolution on the sub-10nm scale, such that three-dimensional information is available from a single view for most samples of interest. Reconstruction algorithms that allow to access this 3D phase-contrast information include multi-slice ptychography [6,7] and S-matrix phase-retrieval [3] and depth-sectioning [4,5]. Both algorithms have only recently been demonstrated for samples thicker than 2 depths of focus [4, 6], and are currently not widely available to the community. In this talk we introduce smpr3d (pronounced “semper 3d”, which stands for S - M atrix P hase R etrieval and 3D imaging; semper is latin for “always”, meaning there is (almost) always 3D information in your data), an open-source toolkit implemented using python and pytorch, that allows reconstruction of 3D phase-contrast images from single 4D-STEM scans and 4D-STEM focal-series measurements, both on single commodity hardware accelerators and High-Performance Computing architectures. We discuss common experimental parameters and preprocessing steps to produce 3D phase-contrast volumes from 4D-STEM measurements at the atomic scale.