
Removing grid structure in angle-resolved photoemission spectra via deep learning
method
Junde Liu,1, 2 Dongchen Huang,1, 2 Yi-feng Yang,1, 2, 3, ∗and Tian Qian1, 2, 3, †
1Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics and Institute of Physics,
Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China
2University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
3Songshan Lake Materials Laboratory, Dongguan, Guangdong 523808, China
(Dated: May 16, 2023)
Spectroscopic data may often contain unwanted extrinsic signals. For example, in the angle-
resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) experiment, a wire mesh is typically placed in front
of the CCD to block stray photo-electrons but could cause a grid-like structure in the spectra
during quick measurement mode. In the past, this structure was often removed using the mathe-
matical Fourier filtering method by erasing the periodic structure. However, this method may lead
to information loss and vacancies in the spectra because the grid structure is not strictly linearly
superimposed. Here, we propose a deep learning method to overcome this problem effectively. Our
method takes advantage of the self-correlation information within the spectra themselves and can
greatly optimize the quality of the spectra while removing the grid structure and noise simulta-
neously. It has the potential to be extended to all spectroscopic measurements to eliminate other
extrinsic signals and enhance the spectral quality based on the self-correlation of the spectra solely.
I. INTRODUCTION
In the past decades, ARPES has driven the research
of novel quantum materials with its incredible ability to
directly probe the electronic structures [1–7]. Owing to
the rapid development of experimental techniques, highly
rapid data acquisition modes (”fixed” or ”dithered”
modes) are frequently required in many application sce-
narios. For example, the fast scanning mode is often used
in spatial-resolved ARPES experiments to map the en-
ergy band spectra of a wide area of the sample [8,9].
It is also preferred when the spot size of the laser beam
is tiny, in which case the measurement should be lim-
ited to a very short time to avoid sample damage [10]. In
addition, the fast scanning mode can save a lot of acquisi-
tion time for measuring higher-dimensional data, such as
band structures in two-dimensional momentum space or
dynamical electronic structures in time-resolved ARPES
[11–15].
However, because of the metal mesh in front of the
analyzer CCD, the spectra obtained using the fast scan-
ning mode typically have a grid-like structure as shown in
Fig. 1(a) [7,16], which hinders the direct observation of
energy band features. Although the grid structure may
be averaged out using the swept mode, measurements in
this mode often cover a large portion of unwanted energy
ranges, causing a significant time waste in opposition to
the original purpose. Post-spectral processing techniques
and methods are hence needed to remove this grid struc-
ture.
A traditional method is to use Fourier filtering by con-
verting the real space spectra to the Fourier domain [16].
∗Corresponding author:yifeng@iphy.ac.cn
†Corresponding author:tqian@iphy.ac.cn
But simply erasing the peaks in Fourier space may lose
intrinsic information because the grid structure is not
strictly periodic and linearly superimposed. For instance,
the peaks and energy bands in Fourier space may merge
together when their widths are comparable, which makes
it difficult to remove the peaks without losing information
about the energy bands. It may become even more chal-
lenging when the data quality is noisy or not good enough
so that the peaks in Fourier space cannot be well identi-
fied. Therefore, the traditional Fourier filtering method
requires the peaks in Fourier space to be sharp and dis-
tinguishable from the intrinsic bands, which essentially
limits the range of its application scenarios.
Fortunately, machine learning methods have shown
strong capabilities in spectra processing [17–20]. Deep
learning-based methods can achieve better perfor-
mance than traditional mathematical Gaussian smooth-
ing methods in removing noise from spectra [20]. More
surprisingly, we have shown that a noisy spectra image
can be decomposed into an image of clean spectra and
an image corresponding to noise, provided that the noise
is sparse and not so coherent with the intrinsic energy
bands. This inspired us to view the grid structure as an
extrinsic signal, so that the spectra may be decomposed
into a clean part and a grid part.
Following the above line of thought, we propose a deep
learning-based method to remove the grid structure and
identify the intrinsic signal in the measured ARPES spec-
tra in this work. Our method utilizes the self-correlation
information of the spectra themselves and parameterizes
the observed ARPES data by two convolutional neural
networks (CNNs). One network is designed to extract
the clean spectra, and the other aims to extract the grid
texture. We show that this enables us to preserve the
signal of the energy bands in the spectra even if the grid
width and energy bandwidth are comparable or the spec-
tral quality is not so good. As a result, our method can
arXiv:2210.11200v2 [cond-mat.mtrl-sci] 15 May 2023