Enable High-Precision 4D-STEM Measurements with Beam Precession

Why Conventional STEM Workflows Fall Short for Modern Materials

Advanced and functional materials require more than conventional STEM imaging and EDS mapping. Understanding atomic structure, crystallinity, and phase is essential for development and production, yet traditional TEM/STEM systems face critical limitations when equipped for 4D-STEM.

Instability and misalignments in EM optics reduce reproducibility of measurements. Dynamical scattering compromises accuracy and precision in diffraction analysis. Slow beam precession limits acquisition speed and throughput, resulting in batch data collection protocols and time-consuming post-processing procedures.

These bottlenecks make diffraction mapping workflows inefficient and difficult to scale — despite their value for revealing material structural and functional properties over large areas at nanometer resolution.

Tescan TENSOR™ was designed to overcome these challenges with a system built specifically for advanced analytical STEM with fully integrated and synchronized beam precession.

How Precession-Enhanced 4D-STEM Was Performed Using Tescan TENSOR™

The Tescan TENSOR™ system was purpose-built as a dedicated analytical STEM platform, with optics, scanning, and detectors optimized for fast diffraction analysis. A proprietary in-built system for beam precession was integrated into the TENSOR system to improve diffraction uniformity and reduce dynamical effects in electron diffraction datasets.

Diffraction patterns were recorded using the DECTRIS QUADRO hybrid-pixel detector, providing single-electron sensitivity and noise-free readout. Complete synchronization of beam scanning, blanking, precession, and detector readout ensured naturally correlative multimodal datasets.

Explore™ software provided integrated control of acquisition, pattern recognition, and mapping, eliminating the need for external data export and post-processing. This workflow enabled robust, high-precision 4D-STEM measurements suitable for strain, orientation, and phase analysis in advanced materials.

High-Precision 4D-STEM Strain and Orientation Mapping with Tescan TENSOR™

Tescan TENSOR™ demonstrated reliable precession-assisted 4D-STEM workflows for advanced materials. Automated optics alignment assured superior data quality while beam precession minimized dynamical scattering effects producing diffraction patterns with uniform intensity and improved accuracy for crystallographic analysis.

Using the DECTRIS QUADRO detector, datasets were acquired with single-electron sensitivity and no readout noise. Results showed enhanced reproducibility across users, with default acquisition parameters optimized for each measurement. Real-time processing allowed immediate feedback, enabling users to adjust regions of interest or acquisition settings on the fly.

Comparisons with traditional systems confirmed significant efficiency gains: strain maps that typically require an hour could be completed within 15 minutes on TENSOR. This efficiency, combined with consistent data quality, establishes TENSOR as a dependable platform for high-throughput strain, orientation, and phase mapping in modern materials research.