Influence of loss function and electron dose on ptychography of 2D materials using the Wirtinger flow

Iterative phase retrieval is based on minimising a loss function as a measure of the consistency of an initial guess and underlying experimental data. Under ideal experimental conditions, real data contains Poissonian noise due to counting statistics. In this work, we use the Wirtinger Flow concept in combination with four common loss functions, being the L1 loss, the mean-squared error (MSE), the amplitude loss and the Poisson loss. Since only the latter reflects the counting statistics as an asymmetric Poisson distribution correctly, our simulation study focuses on two main cases. Firstly, high-dose momentum-resolved scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) of an MoS2 monolayer is considered for phase retrieval. In this case, it is found that the four losses perform differently with respect to chemical sensitivity and frequency transfer, which we interprete in terms of the substantially different signal level in the bright and dark field part of diffraction patterns. Remedies are discussed using further simulations, addressing the use of virtual ring detectors for the dark field, or restricting loss calculation to the bright field. Secondly, a dose series is presented down to 100 electrons per diffraction pattern. It is found that all losses yield qualitatively reasonable structural data in the phase, whereas only MSE and Poisson loss range at the correct amplitude level. Chemical contrast is, in general, reliably obtained using the Poisson concept, which also provides the most continuous spatial frequency transfer as to the reconstructed object transmission function. •The Wirtinger Flow concept is introduced to 4D-STEM phase retrieval of 2D materials.•Phase retrieval results depend significantly on type of loss function and noise model.•Loss comprising Poisson statistics is favorable whenever sparse counts are present in diffraction space.