Observations of specimen morphology effects on near-zone-axis convergent-beam electron diffraction patterns

This work presents observations of symmetry breakages in the intensity distributions of near-zone-axis convergent-beam electron diffraction (CBED) patterns that can only be explained by the symmetry of the specimen and not the symmetry of the unit cell describing the atomic structure of the material. The specimen is an aluminium–copper–tin alloy containing voids many tens of nanometres in size within continuous single crystals of the aluminium host matrix. Several CBED patterns where the incident beam enters and exits parallel void facets without the incident beam being perpendicular to these facets are examined. The symmetries in their intensity distributions are explained by the specimen morphology alone using a geometric argument based on the multislice theory. This work shows that it is possible to deduce nanoscale morphological information about the specimen in the direction of the electron beam – the elusive third dimension in transmission electron microscopy – from the inspection of CBED patterns.