Quantitative EMCD by use of a double aperture for simultaneous acquisition of EELS

Highlights: • Parallel acquisition of EELS spectra for EMCD measurements using a double aperture. • Obtaining two EMCD based EELS spectra under exactly the same acquisition conditions. • Achievement of better S/N ratio as compared to qE mode of the energy filter. • Reliable EMCD signals for quantitative analysis of magnetic moments. -- Abstract: The weak signal strength in electron magnetic circular dichroism (EMCD) measurements remains one of the main challenges in the quantification of EMCD related EELS spectra. As a consequence, small variations in peak intensity caused by changes of background intervals, choice of method for extraction of signal intensity and equally differences in sample quality can cause strong changes in the EMCD signal. When aiming for high resolution quantitative EMCD, an additional difficulty consists in the fact that the two angular resolved EELS spectra needed to obtain the EMCD signal are taken at two different instances and it cannot be guaranteed that the acquisition conditions for these two spectra are identical. Here, we present an experimental setup where we use a double hole aperture in the transmission electron microscope to obtain the EMCD signal in a single acquisition. This geometry allows for the parallel acquisition of the two electron energy loss spectra (EELS) under exactly the same conditions. We also compare the double aperture acquisition mode with the qE acquisition mode which has been previously used for parallel acquisition of EMCD. We show that the double aperture mode not only offers better signal to noise ratio as compared to qE mode but also allows for much higher acquisition times to significantly improve the signal quality which is crucial for quantitative analysis of the magnetic moments.