ePDF tools, a processing and analysis package of the atomic pair distribution function for electron diffraction

We present a new processing & analysis package of the atomic pair distribution function (PDF) for the electron diffraction (ED) pattern based on the total scattering theory which has been broadly used in the X-ray or neutron diffraction to reveal the local atomic structures, but PDF analysis based on the electron diffraction is still rarely used for the lack of an efficient PDF tool. The program was written as a package of DigitalMicrograph, a very popular software to record and analyze the data of transmission electron microscopes (TEM) in the most of TEM laboratories. The azimuthal rotation-average projection algorithm was implemented to enhance the signal-noise ratio of the intensity profile. In order to obtain the reduced structure function, the cubic spline fitting method was utilized to subtract the background scattering. The real-time displayed PDF makes data normalization easier and more accurate, and results of coordination numbers and averaged bond angles can be extracted from calibrated PDFs in real time.