Inverse electronic scattering by Green's functions and singular values decomposition

An inverse scattering technique is developed to enable a sample reconstruction from the diffraction figures obtained by electronic projection microscopy. In its Green’s functions formulation, this technique takes account of all orders of diffraction by performing an iterative reconstruction of the wave function on the observation screen. This scattered wave function is then backpropagated to the sample to determine the potential-energy distribution, which is assumed real valued. The method relies on the use of singular values decomposition techniques, thus providing the best least-squares solutions and enabling a reduction of noise. The technique is applied to the analysis of a two-dimensional nanometric sample that is observed in Fresnel conditions with an electronic energy of 25 eV. The algorithm turns out to provide results with a mean relative error of the order of 5% and to be very stable against random noise.