Electron counting detectors in scanning transmission electron microscopy via hardware signal processing.

Transmission electron microscopy is a pivotal instrument in materials and biological sciences due to its ability to provide local structural and spectroscopic information on a wide range of materials. However, the electron detectors used in scanning transmission electron microscopy are often unable to provide quantified information, that is the number of electrons impacting the detector, without exhaustive calibration and processing. This results in arbitrary signal values with slow response times that cannot be used for quantification or comparison to simulations. Here we demonstrate and optimise a hardware signal processing approach to augment electron detectors to perform single electron counting.