Particle diameter, signal-to-noise ratio and beam requirements for extended Rayleigh resolution measurements in the scanning electron microscope
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The extended Rayleigh resolution measure was introduced to give a generalized resolution measure that can be readily applied to imaging and resolving particles that have finite size. Here, we make a detailed analysis of the influence of the particle size on this resolution measure. We apply this to scanning electron microscopy, under simple assumption of a Gaussian electron beam intensity distribution and a directly proportional emitted signal yield without detailed consideration of scattering internal to the sample, other than being proportional to the sample thickness. From this, we produce beam-width normalized characteristics relating the particle diameter and resolution measure, while also taking consideration of the reduced signal yield that occurs from smaller particles. From our analysis of these characteristics, which we fit to experimental image data, we see that particle diameters <0.7 times the beam 1/e full width, d, give agreement better than 10% with the true extended Rayleigh resolution. Furthermore, we consider the signal current that must be collected to reliably distinguish between the mid-gap and peak intensity regions in the particle images. This leads to a practical guide that the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) occurring between large area, continuous regions made of the same materials as the particle and background should typically be 10-30 times greater than the SNR that is desired to be achieved between the peak and mid-gap regions of just resolved adjacent identical particles having diameters in the size range 0.4-0.7d.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it