Determination of the electrostatic potential and electron density of silicon using convergent-beam electron diffraction

A structure-analysis method using convergent-beam electron diffraction (CBED) developed by Tsuda et al. [Tsuda & Tanaka (1999), Acta Cryst. A55, 939-954; Tsuda, Ogata, Takagi, Hashimoto & Tanaka (2002), Acta Cryst. A58, 514-525] has been applied to the determination of the electrostatic potential and electron density of crystalline silicon. CBED patterns recorded at nine different incidences are simultaneously used to improve the accuracy of the refinement. The Debye-Waller factor and low-order structure factors of silicon have been successfully refined only using CBED data. The electrostatic potential and electron-density distribution have been reconstructed from the refined parameters. The latter clearly shows the bonding electrons between the nearest neighbor atoms. The obtained results are compared with the results of other CBED and recent X-ray diffraction experiments. The influence of the number of refined low-order structure factors on the electron density is discussed. The effect of the reduction of experimental data points on the accuracy of the refined parameters is also examined.