Open source (S)TEM control using Nion Swift: powerful and user-friendly software for microscope control, data analysis and visualization

Most of the common software electron microscopy was designed in the 1990s, incrementally updated to the present day, and fails to take advantage of the explosive gains of the last ten years in productivity and efficiency of modern programming languages utilizing open-source resources, especially Python. Electron microscopy has largely been left behind as the rest of the scientific community has moved to more modern approaches to software. As a result, the full potential of modern electron microscopes is not fully realized due to the lack of powerful open source software for collecting, processing, visualizing, and sharing the data. The overall approach is to accelerate development of electron microscopy software based on modern programming concepts. The specific development goals are based on feedback from the electron microscopy community about what is needed most. We will extend the capabilities of Nion Swift, a recent entry into open source software for electron microscope control, to allow its established base of beginning and intermediate users to leverage the large body of related open source resources already available for other fields. The capabilities of the new framework will be demonstrated with several examples of high practical value to the community, including new low-dose imaging and analysis techniques recently made possible by advances in detector technology, such as 5D-STEM. The open-source examples will be designed to be easily adapted to new tasks, and available online in a way that encourages adaptation, repurposing, and sharing. The growing popularity of open-source software in electron microscopy will push the whole field in this direction, a major benefit for the community. Continued development will be supported by sales of microscope systems, and higher functionality through better software will drive a bigger market and additional sales.