Advances in the reconstruction of atom probe tomography data

Key to the integrity of atom probe microanalysis, the tomographic reconstruction is built atom by atom following a simplistic protocol established for previous generations of instruments. In this paper, after a short review of the main reconstruction protocols, we describe recent improvements originating from the use of exact formulae enabling significant reduction of spatial distortions, especially near the edges of the reconstruction. We also show how predictive values for the reconstruction parameters can be derived from electrostatic simulations, and finally introduce parameters varying throughout the analysis. (C) 2010 Elsevier BM. All rights reserved.