3D imaging of nanomaterials by discrete tomography

K. J. BATENBURG; S. BALS; J. SIJBERS; C. KÜBEL; P.A. MIDGLEY; J. C. HERNANDEZ; U. KAISER; E. R. ENCINA; E. A. CORONADO; G. VAN TENDELOO

ULTRAMICROSCOPY

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

Año: 2009 vol. 108 p. 130 - 140

0304-3991

The field of discrete tomography focuses on the reconstruction of samples that consist of only afew different materials. Ideally, a 3D reconstruction of such a sample should contain only onegrey level for each of the compositions in the sample. By exploiting this property in thereconstruction algorithm, either the quality of the reconstruction can be improved significantly,or the number of required projection images can be reduced. The discrete reconstructiontypically contains fewer artifacts and does not have to be segmented, as it already contains onegrey level for each composition.Recently, a new algorithm, called DART, has been proposed that can be used effectively onexperimental electron tomography datasets. In this paper, we propose discrete tomography as ageneral reconstruction method for electron tomography in materials science. We describe thebasic principles of DART and show that it can be applied successfully to three different types ofsamples, consisting of embedded ErSi2 nanocrystals, a carbon nanotube grown from a catalystparticle, and a single gold nanoparticle, respectively.