Aberration-corrected and energy-filtered precession electron diffraction

We report initial findings on improvements to precession electron diffraction (PED) achieved through aberration correction of the probe-forming lens and by energy-filtering. Using current-generation aberration correctors, we show that PED patterns can, in principle, be acquired with sub-nm spatial resolution. We present initial experimental results that illustrate aberration-corrected PED of nanostructured alloys. We show also that zero loss energy filtering minimizes the inelastic background in a PED pattern, important for weak reflections, and leads to an improvement in the refinement of a crystal structure using elastic-only intensities.