Differential phase contrast: An integral perspective

Differential phase contrast (DPC) in a scanning transmission electron microscope is a widely employed technique for probing electromagnetic fields on the nanoscale. We show that the DPC signal corresponds to the averaged lateral probability current of the scattered electron probe. Based on this result we discuss the interpretation of DPC in terms of the projected electric and magnetic fields and the influence of experimental parameters thereon. We further show that DPC can be interpreted as a quantum weak measurement and that the reciprocal broad beam illumination technique is given by an astigmatic transport of intensity reconstruction.