Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

It is demonstrated that energy-filtered transmission electron microscope imaging of a planar interface between two crystals can be optimized by orienting a sample so that the interface is parallel to the electron beam, but not directly on a zone axis. This orientation reduces diffraction contrast in the unfiltered (and zero-loss) image, which in turn, reduces residual diffraction contrast in raw energy-filtered images (EFI), jump-ratio images and elemental maps. This tilting procedure produces EFI which are more directly interpretable and, in many cases, possess superior spatial resolution and compositional contrast compared to EFI acquired directly on a zone axis.