JEOL's minimum-dose method focuses and corrects astigmatism away from the recording position before exposing it, reducing irradiation of the chosen field.[ref] A downstream objective aperture cannot undo irradiation that has already reached the specimen: rejecting more outgoing Electrons does not itself reduce specimen exposure.
For an original dose budget, define as incident Electron count per specimen area, rather than absorbed energy per mass. A uniform beam of electric current magnitude , illuminating area for time , gives
where is the elementary charge. Choosing , and gives approximately incident Electrons, or . This is an invented exposure calculation, not a safe-dose recommendation. Focusing and searching exposures must also enter the accumulated budget.
If detected counts follow a Poisson distribution, a mean count has standard deviation . Ignoring background, accepted counts therefore have relative counting uncertainty, while have . Reducing accepted counts can reveal useful diffraction contrast while increasing counting uncertainty. It is useful to specify both contrast and count budget when discussing electron microscope resolution.
A proposed measurement calibration sequence records a beam-blocked detector background, an illuminated empty support region, and a specimen image with fixed voltage, exposure and detector gain. Test detector linearity with exposure time before comparing corrected intensities. Calibrate the image scale against a known spacing, as in microscope scale calibration, and independently calibrate electron diffraction spacing at its own lens settings; one calibration does not supply the other. Register compared regions, record objective aperture selection, specimen tilt and accumulated exposure, then repeat the first setting to test drift and irradiation changes. These are proposed controls, not undocumented steps attributed to JEOL's silicon example.