Abstract
Electron tomography allows the three-dimensional (3D) quantitative characterization of nanostructures, provided a monotonic relationship is fulfilled between the projected signal and the atomic number and thickness of the specimen. This requirement is not satisfied if the micrographs are affected by (i) diffraction contrast, (ii) absorption-thickness limit or (iii) detector saturation. The effects of non-monotonic tomography acquisition have been examined using computer simulations and experimental tilt series of conical tungsten tips. It is shown that the reconstruction artefacts arising from non-linearity can be best predicted by considering geometric tomography (which reconstructs the object external shape) and quantitative tomography (which reconstructs the 3D density function) as limiting cases.
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