).
Institut für Angewandte Physik,
TU Wien, 1040 Wien, Austria
Department of Chemistry, TUM School of Natural Sciences, Technical University of Munich, D-85748 Garching bei München, Germany
Solid State Physics, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, D-91058 Erlangen, Germany
As part of the Vienna package for Erlangen LEED, low-energy electron diffraction (ViPErLEED) project, computer programs have been developed for facile and user-friendly data extraction from movies of LEED images. The programs make use of some concepts from astronomical image processing and analysis. As a first step, flat-field and dark-frame corrections reduce the effects of inhomogeneities of the camera and screen. In a second step, for identifying all diffraction maxima ("spots"), it is sufficient to manually mark and label a single spot or very few spots. Then the program can automatically identify all other spots and determine the distortions of the image. This forms the basis for automatic spot tracking (i.e., following the spots as they move across the LEED screen) and intensity measurement. Even for complex structures with hundreds to a few thousand diffraction beams, this step takes less than a minute. The package also includes a program for further processing of these I(V) curves (averaging of equivalent beams, manual and/or automatic selection, smoothing) as well as several utilities. The software is implemented as a set of plugins for the public-domain image processing program ImageJ and provided as an open-source package.
Corresponding author: Michael Schmid (schmid).
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