Electronic devices are engineered at increasingly smaller length scales; new metrologies to understand nanoscale thermodynamics are needed. Temperature and pressure are fundamental thermodynamic quantities whose nanoscale measurement is challenging as physical contact inevitably perturbs the system. Here we demonstrate Kikuchi diffraction thermometry (KDTh), a non-contact scanning electron microscope (SEM) technique capable of mapping nanoscale temperatures and pressures. KDTh detects local volumetric lattice changes in crystalline samples by precisely fitting Kikuchi patterns. Temperature changes are deduced using the coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE). We map lattice parameters and temperatures on Joule-heated graphite by rastering a 5.5-nm electron probe across the sample. Our parameter precision is ~0.01% and our temperature sensitivity is 2.2 K/Hz. KDTh offers advanced sensitivity by fitting the entire Kikuchi pattern, even beyond the precision measured in transmission electron microscopy. KDTh can operate in both transmission (transmission Kikuchi diffraction, TKD) and reflection (electron backscatter diffraction, EBSD) modes.
@article{arxiv.2510.14175,
title = {Mapping Temperature Using Transmission Kikuchi Diffraction},
author = {Yueyun Chen and Xin Yi Ling and Jared Lodico and Tristan P. O`Neill and B. C. Regan and Matthew Mecklenburg},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.14175},
year = {2025}
}