Aberration measurement in HRTEM: implementation and diagnostic use of numerical procedures for the highly precise recognition of diffractogram patterns.

The precise characterisation of the instrumental imaging properties in the form of aberration parameters constitutes an almost universal necessity in quantitative HRTEM, and is underlying most hardware and software techniques established in this field. We focus in this paper on the numerical analysis of individual diffractograms as a first preparatory step for further publications on HRTEM aberration measurement. The extraction of the defocus and the 2-fold astigmatism from a diffractogram is a classical pattern recognition problem, which we believe to have solved in a near-optimum way concerning precision, speed, and robustness. The newly gained measurement precision allows us to resolve fluctuations of the defocus and the 2-fold astigmatism and to assess thereby the optical stability of electron microscopes. Quantitative stability criteria are elaborated, which may serve as helpful guidelines for daily work as well as for microscope acceptance tests.