Automated plasmon peak fitting derived temperature mapping in a scanning transmission electron microscope

Nanoscale thermometry, an approach based on non-invasive, yet precise measurements of temperature with nanometer spatial resolution, has emerged as a very active field of research over the last few years. In transmission electron microscopy, nanoscale thermometry is particularly important during in situ experiments or to assess the effects of beam induced heating. In this article, we present a nanoscale thermometry approach based on electron energy-loss spectroscopy in a transmission electron microscope to measure locally the temperature of silicon nanoparticles using the energy shift of the plasmon resonance peak with respect to the zero-loss peak as a function of temperature. We demonstrate that using non-negative matrix factorization and curve fitting of stacked spectra, the temperature accuracy can be improved significantly over previously reported manual fitting approaches. We will discuss the necessary acquisition parameters to achieve a precision of 6 meV to determine the plasmon peak position.