Interactive event-driven 4D-STEM with Timepix4 and live analytical ptychography

Abstract

Four-dimensional scanning transmission electron microscopy provides access to rich diffraction information at every probe position, but the high data rates associated with pixelated detectors remain a major challenge for interactive operation. Event-driven detectors offer an efficient alternative by representing the measurement as a sparse stream of individual incidences, substantially reducing requirements related to data handling and enabling on-the-fly processing. Here, we develop a high-throughput, real-time, 4D-STEM workflow based on the Timepix4 detector and demonstrate its operation at microsecond dwell times and standard beam currents. A common clock shared by the scan unit and detector allows the probe position of each electron event to be determined directly from its time-of-arrival, eliminating the need for inter-stream synchronization and enabling fully concurrent and independent multi-stream processing. The resulting pipeline continuously processes the detector data during acquisition, with the reconstructed images directly available. We demonstrate live virtual annular detector imaging, Real-Time Integration Center of Mass and direct electron ptychography within the guided progressive reconstructive imaging framework. The workflow sustains the high event rates of Timepix4 while maintaining zero latency for live interactive operation, thus extending event-driven 4D-STEM towards beam currents and acquisition conditions beyond those previously demonstrated with Timepix3-based systems. These results demonstrate that the combination of high-bandwidth event-driven detection, hardware-level synchronization and parallel processing can transform 4D-STEM from an offline technique into an interactive imaging modality, in which dose-efficient phase contrast and diffraction-based signals can serve directly as immediate feedback during STEM experiments.