The 4D Camera: An 87 kHz Direct Electron Detector for Scanning/Transmission Electron Microscopy

Peter Ercius¹, Ian J Johnson², Philipp Pelz¹, Benjamin H Savitzky¹, Lauren Hughes¹, Hamish G Brown¹, Steven E Zeltmann³, Shang-Lin Hsu³, Cassio C S Pedroso⁴, Bruce E Cohen^{4

5}, Ramamoorthy Ramesh^{3

6

7}, David Paul⁸, John M Joseph², Thorsten Stezelberger², Cory Czarnik⁹, Matthew Lent⁹, Erin Fong², Jim Ciston¹, Mary C Scott^{1

3}, Colin Ophus¹, Andrew M Minor^{1

3}, Peter Denes¹

Affiliations

¹ National Center for Electron Microscopy, Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
² Division of Engineering, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
³ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
⁴ Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
⁵ Division of Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
⁶ Division of Materials Science, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
⁷ Department of Physics, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
⁸ National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
⁹ Gatan Inc., Pleasanton, CA 94588, USA.

PMID: 39298134
DOI: 10.1093/mam/ozae086

Free article

The 4D Camera: An 87 kHz Direct Electron Detector for Scanning/Transmission Electron Microscopy

Peter Ercius et al. Microsc Microanal. 2024.

Free article

. 2024 Nov 4;30(5):903-912.

doi: 10.1093/mam/ozae086.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ National Center for Electron Microscopy, Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
² Division of Engineering, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
³ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
⁴ Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
⁵ Division of Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
⁶ Division of Materials Science, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
⁷ Department of Physics, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
⁸ National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA.
⁹ Gatan Inc., Pleasanton, CA 94588, USA.

PMID: 39298134
DOI: 10.1093/mam/ozae086

Abstract

We describe the development, operation, and application of the 4D Camera-a 576 by 576 pixel active pixel sensor for scanning/transmission electron microscopy which operates at 87,000 Hz. The detector generates data at ∼480 Gbit/s which is captured by dedicated receiver computers with a parallelized software infrastructure that has been implemented to process the resulting 10-700 Gigabyte-sized raw datasets. The back illuminated detector provides the ability to detect single electron events at accelerating voltages from 30 to 300 kV. Through electron counting, the resulting sparse data sets are reduced in size by 10--300× compared to the raw data, and open-source sparsity-based processing algorithms offer rapid data analysis. The high frame rate allows for large and complex scanning diffraction experiments to be accomplished with typical scanning transmission electron microscopy scanning parameters.

Keywords: 4D-STEM; active pixel sensor; direct electron detector; phase contrast STEM; scanning transmission electron microscopy.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of Interest: The authors declare that they have no competing interest.

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The 4D Camera: An 87 kHz Direct Electron Detector for Scanning/Transmission Electron Microscopy

Affiliations

The 4D Camera: An 87 kHz Direct Electron Detector for Scanning/Transmission Electron Microscopy

Authors

Affiliations

Abstract

Conflict of interest statement

LinkOut - more resources

Full Text Sources