Critical role of inelastic interactions in quantitative electron microscopy

A semiquantitative correlation between experimental observations and theoretical prediction in electron microscopy is achieved. Experiments conducted on amorphous silicon in the convergent beam electron diffraction mode provide measurements of the reduction of the central-disk intensity. In addition to elastic scattering the effects of multiple inelastic scattering of the probe electrons were incorporated into the theory describing beam propagation through the specimen. With incorporation of the dominant plasmon scattering a better than 10% match of the theory with experiment is observed indicating the critical role of multiple inelastic scattering in quantitative electron diffraction and imaging.