Is there chaos in the electron microscope?

Abstract

High-temperature superconductor $Bi_{2}Sr_{2}CaCu_{2}O_{8}+x$ has been investigated by the high-resolution electron microscope (HREM) and the photodensitometric technique in order to resolve the sub-atomic shifts in the modulated structure. This investigation has shown that the background noise is pronounced, indicating some kind of ordering in certain crystallographic directions. We have found that the "mapping" of the charge densities by the inverse Fourier transform of the diffracted electron image and the connections to the crystal structure can be easily established in the case of elastically, as well as the inelastically scattered electrons. The order of the details in so obtained "inelastic" electron "micrographs", as well as the dependence of the structure of the EM image on the initial conditions of the inverse Fourier transform, leads to the conclusion that there is an order emerging from the diffuse scattered electron diffraction patterns. Data sets from digitalized densitograms are analysed by the Rescaled range (R/S) method in order to study fractal and long-range correlation properties of the inelastic scattered electrons in the "noise" region between Bragg reflections. The results of the R/S analysis showed that the value of the Hurst exponent was H$\neq$ 0.5, indicating that the "ordering" of the noise in the Inverse (Fourier) space was much more pronounced at longer distances (about 440 atom spacings), then for shorter distances of about 55 atom spacings.