title: Noise estimation for off-axis electron holography.
abstract: Off-axis electron holography provides access to the phase of the elastically scattered wave in a transmission electron microscope at scales ranging from several hundreds of nanometres down to 0.1nm. In many cases the reconstructed phase shift is directly proportional to projected electric and magnetic potentials rendering electron holography a useful and established characterisation method for materials science. However, quantitative interpretation of experimental phase shifts requires quantitative knowledge about the noise, which has been previously established for some limiting cases only. Here, we present a general noise transfer formalism for off-axis electron holography allowing to compute the covariance (noise) of reconstructed amplitude and phase from characteristic detector functions and general properties of the reconstruction process. Experimentally, we verify the presented noise transfer formulas for two different cameras with and without objects within the errors given by the experimental noise determination.
authors.affiliation: Triebenberg Labor, Institut für Strukturphysik, Technische Universität Dresden, D-01062 Dresden, Germany. Electronic address: Falk.Roeder@Triebenberg.de.
authors.forename: Falk
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Röder
authors.affiliation: Triebenberg Labor, Institut für Strukturphysik, Technische Universität Dresden, D-01062 Dresden, Germany.
authors.forename: Axel
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Lubk
authors.affiliation: Triebenberg Labor, Institut für Strukturphysik, Technische Universität Dresden, D-01062 Dresden, Germany.
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Wolf
authors.affiliation: Institut für Optik und Atomare Physik, Technische Universität Berlin, Straße des 17. Juni 135, 10623 Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Tore
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Niermann
keywords: Electron holography; Holographic reconstruction; Noise spread function; Noise transfer