On the use of beam precession for serial electron crystallography

During the past few years, serial electron crystallography (serial electron diffraction) has been gaining attention for the structure determination of crystalline compounds that are sensitive to irradiation by an electron beam. By recording a single electron diffraction pattern per crystal, indexing thousands to tens of thousands of such patterns and merging the reflection intensities of the successfully indexed patterns, one can retrieve crystal structure models with strongly mitigated beam damage contributions. However, one of the technique's bottlenecks is the need to obtain so many well indexed diffraction patterns, which leads to the collection of raw diffraction data in an automated way that usually yields low indexing rates. This work demonstrates how to overcome this limitation by performing the serial crystallography experiment following a semi-automated routine with a precessed electron beam (serial precession electron diffraction). The precession movement increases the number of reflections present in the diffraction patterns, and dynamical effects related to specific orientations of the crystals with respect to the electron beam are greatly minimized. This leads to more uniform reflection intensities across the serial data set, and a smaller number of patterns are required to merge the reflection intensities for good statistics. Furthermore, structure refinements based on the dynamical diffraction theory become possible due to the diffraction volume integration of beam precession, providing a novel approach for more accurate structure models. In this context, the use of beam precession is presented as an advantageous tool for serial electron crystallography, as it enables reliable crystal structure analysis with a lower amount of diffraction data.