Direct electron detection

Our EBSD research at Strathclyde is mainly focused on the development of new direct electron detectors [23]. We are using the Timepix and Medipix detectors [24, 25], which belongs to the CMOS hybrid pixel detectors family. It is one of the outcomes of an international collaboration (Medipix) hosted at CERN, established to provide a solution for a range of problems in X-ray and gamma-ray imaging in hostile conditions. Using the Timepix allows digital direct electron detection and energy filtering; it enables EBSPs to be acquired with reduced noise and increased contrast, and an unprecedented increase in detail is observed in the patterns (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Experimental and simulated EBSPs from diamond (a, d, g), Si (b, e, h) and GaN (c, f, i) for an incident beam energy of 20 keV and a probe current of ~10 nA. (a-c) were acquired with a high pass energy filter of 4.6 keV, (d-f) were acquired with a high pass energy filter of 19.4 keV, and (g-i) are dynamical simulations. The insets are 2D fast Fourier transforms of each image.

References
Llopart, X., Ballabriga, R., Campbell, M., Tlustos, L., & Wong, W. (2007). Timepix, a 65k programmable pixel readout chip for arrival time, energy and/or photon counting measurements. Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A: Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment, 581, 485. https://doi.org/http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nima.2007.08.079
Llopart, X., Campbell, M., Dinapoli, R., San Segundo, D., & Pernigotti, E. (2002). Medipix2: A 64-k pixel readout chip with 55-μm square elements working in single photon counting mode. Nuclear Science, IEEE Transactions On, 49, 2279. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1046904
Vespucci, S., Winkelmann, A., Naresh-Kumar, G., Mingard, K. P., Maneuski, D., Edwards, P. R., Day, A. P., O’Shea, V., & Trager-Cowan, C. (2015). Digital direct electron imaging of energy filtered electron backscatter diffraction patterns. Physical Review B, 92, 205301. https://journals.aps.org/prb/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevB.92.205301