2D calculation of parasitic fields in misaligned multipole electron-optical systems.

The effects of geometrical imperfections in electron-optical components are usually evaluated in 3D simulations. These calculations inherently take a long time, require a large amount of memory, and do not directly produce the necessary axial field functions. We present a 2D perturbation method to calculate parasitic fields in misaligned multipole systems. Our method is based on finding an equivalent potential perturbation, similarly to Sturrock's method, but does not rely on the potential being differentiable. The method is directly applicable to both electrostatic and non-saturated magnetic problems. It does not require any 3D data and it is fully compatible with existing finite element method codes such as EOD. The proposed method produces axial field functions with an accuracy of units to a few tens of percents, depending on the number of unperturbed multipole field components used and the geometry. The results can then be used, for instance, to determine the parasitic imaging aberrations of the misaligned optical system using standard methods, in order to evaluate the effect of mechanical design tolerances.

Accurate interpolation of 3D fields in charged particle optics.

Standard 3D interpolation polynomials often suffer from numerical errors of the calculated field and lack of node points in the 3D solution. We introduce a novel method for accurate and smooth interpolation of arbitrary electromagnetic fields in the vicinity of the optical axis valid up to 90% of the bore radius. Our method combines Fourier analysis and Gaussian wavelet interpolation and provides the axial multipole field functions and their derivatives analytically. The results are accurate and noiseless, usually up to the 5th derivative. This is very advantageous for further applications, such as accurate particle tracing, and evaluation of aberration coefficients and other optical properties. The proposed method also enables studying the strength and orientation of all multipole field components. To illustrate the capabilities of the proposed algorithm, we present three examples: a magnetic lens with a hole in the polepiece, a saturated magnetic lens with an elliptic polepiece, and an electrostatic 8-electrode multipole.