Unveiling the impact of temperature on magnon diffuse scattering detection in the transmission electron microscope

Abstract: Magnon diffuse scattering (MDS) signals could be studied with high spatial resolution in scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM), thanks to recent technological progress in electron energy loss spectroscopy. However, detecting MDS signals in STEM is challenging due to their overlap with stronger thermal diffuse scattering (TDS) signals. In bcc Fe at 300 K, MDS signals greater than or comparable to TDS signals occur under the central Bragg disk, into a currently inaccesible energy-loss region. Therefore, to detect MDS in STEM, it is necessary to find conditions in which TDS and MDS signals can be separated. Temperature may be a key factor due to the distinct thermal signatures of magnon and phonon signals. In this work, we present a study on the effects of temperature on MDS and TDS in bcc Fe -- considering a detector outside the central Bragg disk and a fixed convergent electron probe -- using the frozen phonon and frozen magnon multislice methods. Our study reveals that neglecting the effects of atomic vibrations causes the MDS signal to grow approximately linearly up to the Curie temperature of Fe, after which it exhibits less variation. The MDS signal displays an alternating behavior due to dynamical diffraction, instead of increasing monotonically as a function of thickness. Including the effects of atomic vibrations through a complex atomic electrostatic potential causes the linear growth of the MDS signal to change to a non-linear behavior that exhibits a predominant peak for a sample of thickness 16.072 nm at 1100 K. In contrast, the TDS signal grows more linearly than the MDS signal but still exhibits appreciable dynamical diffraction effects. An analysis of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) shows that the MDS signal can be a statistically significant contribution to the total scattering intensity under realizable measurement conditions and acquisition times.