
MagNet: machine learning enhanced three-dimensional magnetic reconstruction
Boyao Lyu,1, 2, ∗Shihua Zhao,3, 4, 5, ∗Yibo Zhang,3, 6 Weiwei Wang,7Haifeng Du,1and Jiadong Zang3, 8, †
1Anhui Province Key Laboratory of Condensed Matter Physics at Extreme Conditions,
High Magnetic Field Laboratory of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hefei, 230031, China
2University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, 230031, China
3Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of New Hampshire, Durham, New Hampshire 03824, USA
4Department of Physics, The City College of New York, New York, NY 10031, USA
5Physics Program, Graduate Center of the City University of New York, New York, NY 10016, USA
6Department of Chemistry, University of New Hampshire, Durham, New Hampshire 03824, USA
7Institutes of Physical Science and Information Technology, Anhui University, Hefei 230601, China
8Materials Science Program, University of New Hampshire, Durham, New Hampshire 03824, USA
Three-dimensional (3D) magnetic reconstruction is vital to the study of novel magnetic materials
for 3D spintronics. Vector field electron tomography (VFET) is a major in house tool to achieve that.
However, conventional VFET reconstruction exhibits significant artefacts due to the unavoidable
presence of missing wedges. In this article, we propose a deep-learning enhanced VFET method to
address this issue. A magnetic textures library is built by micromagnetic simulations. MagNet, an
U-shaped convolutional neural network, is trained and tested with dataset generated from the library.
We demonstrate that MagNet outperforms conventional VFET under missing wedge. Quality of
reconstructed magnetic induction fields is significantly improved.
Keywords: Vector field electron tomography, deep learning, micromagnetism
I. INTRODUCTION
Recent studies of novel magnetic materials with topo-
logical textures, such as skyrmionic families1–4, become
an important driving force in spintronics to develop next
generation nano-electronic devices5,6. In addition to
two-dimensional (2D) topological textures, their three-
dimensional (3D) counterparts are emergent, such as the
skyrmion bundle and magnetic hopfion7,8. 3D magnetic
textures are prominent due to their potentially larger
volume-density and novel dynamics. However, imaging a
3D magnetic configuration is a major obstacle. Most ex-
isting magnetic imaging tools such as Kerr microscopy9,
magnetic force microscopy10, and spin-polarized scan-
ning tunneling microscopy11 can only resolve magnetic
configurations on the 2D surface of a sample. Recent
advances in 3D magnetic imaging have been made. Neu-
tron scattering12–14, magnetic X-ray dichroism15–18 and
Lorentz transmission electron microscopy (LTEM)19 can
probe the internal magnetic structure of a sample. Com-
pared to neutron scattering and X-ray dichroism, LTEM
and its derivatives can achieve sub-Angstrom20 resolu-
tion without accelerating particles with a synchrotron.
It is thus attractive to enable LTEM-based 3D magnetic
reconstructions.
3D vector field electron tomography (VFET), i.e. 3D
magnetic reconstruction from electron phase shifts re-
trieved from electron holography (EH)21 or transport of
intensity (TIE) equation22,is a relatively new but fast de-
veloping 3D magnetic imaging technique. Compared to
∗These authors contributed equally to this work
†Jiadong.Zang@unh.edu
LTEM, phase retrieval in EH significantly elevates the
spatial resolution of the imaging. Since its earliest pro-
posal by Lai et al. in 199423, the theoretical foundation
of VFET has been established24–26. Once clean electron
phase shifts of two orthogonal and complete tilt series
are collected, two components of the magnetic induction
field Bcan be reconstructed separately by the central
slicing theorem in scalar tomography. The third com-
ponent of Bcan then be calculated by the constraint
∇ ⋅ B=0. Thus conventional analytical algorithms, such
as weighted backprojection method (WBP) and regrid-
ding reconstruction method (Gridrec) can be directly ex-
tended to VFET27. However, in real experiments, there
are many sources of inevitable errors during electron
phase shifts collection, such as noise, sparsity, misalign-
ment, and missing wedge. Those errors thus lead to sig-
nificant inevitable artefacts. Iterative algorithms such
as algebraic reconstruction technique (ART) and simul-
taneous iterative reconstruction technique(SIRT), as the
second generation of reconstruction algorithms, show the
capability of working with data with missing-wedge prob-
lem and sparse sampling problem27. Recent advances of
iterative algorithms, such as model based iterative recon-
struction (MBIR)28,29, incorporate with physical knowl-
edge and geometrical information of the sample as prior
knowledge and can reconstruct the three components si-
multaneously. But iteratively minimizing a cost function
has to pay a price of eight times longer run-time com-
pared to conventional analytical methods29.
With the development of machine learning techniques,
deep learning tomography (DLT) is emergent as the third
generation reconstruction algorithm. Model with Unet30
architecture has already shown its capability in remov-
ing artefacts in limited-angle tomography31. Instead of
building an end-to-end DLT algorithm, combining con-
arXiv:2210.03066v1 [cond-mat.mtrl-sci] 6 Oct 2022