High-resolution transmission electron microscopy on an absolute contrast scale.

A fully quantitative approach to high-resolution transmission electron microscopy requires a satisfactory match between image simulations and experiments. While almost perfect agreement between simulations and experiments is routinely achieved on a relative contrast level, a huge mutual discrepancy in the absolute image contrast by a factor of 3 has been frequently reported. It is shown that a major reason for this well-known contrast discrepancy, which is often called Stobbs-factor problem, lies in the neglect of the detector modulation-transfer function in image simulations.