A new way of producing electron vortex probes for STEM

A spiral holographic aperture is used in the condensor plane of a scanning transmission electron microscope to produce a focussed electron vortex probe carrying a topological charge of either 1, 0 or +1. The spiral aperture design has a major advantage over the previously used forked aperture in that the three beams with topological charge m= -1, 0, and 1 are not side by side in the specimen plane, but rather on top of each other, focussed at different heights. This allows us to have only one selected beam in focus on the sample while the others contribute only to a background signal. In this paper we describe the working principle as well as first experimental results demonstrating atomic resolution HAADF STEM images obtained with electron vortex probes. These results pave the way for atomic resolution magnetic information when combined with electron energy loss spectroscopy. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.