On the alignment for precession electron diffraction

Precession electron diffraction has seen a fast increase in its adoption as a technique for solving crystallographic structures as well as analternative to conventional selected-area and converged-beam diffraction methods. One of the key issues of precession is the pivot point alignment, as a stationary apparent beam does not guarantee a fixed pivot point. A large precession tilt angle, along with pre-field and post-field misalignment, induces shift in the image plane. We point out here that the beam should be aligned to the pre-field optic axis to keep the electron illumination stationary during the rocking process. A practical alignment procedure is suggested with the focus placed on minimizing the beam wandering on the specimen, and is demonstrated fora (110)-oriented silicon single crystal and for a carbide phase (similar to 20 nm in size) within a cast cobalt-chromium-molybdenum alloy. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.