The effects of thermal diffuse scattering on diffraction of highly-accelerated electrons by crystal lattices are investigated with a method that combines the frozen phonon approximation with an exact numerical solution of the time-dependent Schrödinger equation. The phonon configuration for each single-electron diffraction process is determined by means of Einstein's model. It is shown that this procedure provides the possibility of describing and explaining, in a natural way, after averaging over a number of electron realizations, how the typical diffraction features that characterize a fully coherent pattern are gradually suppressed by thermally-induced incoherence. This is achieved by a controlled increase of the lattice atomic vibrations and is in contrast to the use of attenuating Debye-Waller factors and complex potential absorbers. A lattice with reduced dimensionality is first considered as a working model, where the method renders results compatible with those reported in the literature. Subsequently, a full three-dimensional system is simulated and results are compared to experimental imaging displaying the method's reliability.

中文翻译：

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热扩散散射的波包数值研究：电子衍射模拟的时变量子方法。

通过将冻结的声子逼近与时变Schrödinger方程的精确数值解结合起来的方法，研究了热扩散散射对高加速电子通过晶格衍射的影响。每个单电子衍射过程的声子构型是通过爱因斯坦模型确定的。结果表明，该程序提供了一种可能性，以自然的方式，在对多个电子实现进行平均后，如何通过热诱导的非相干性逐步抑制表征完全相干图案的典型衍射特征。这是通过晶格原子振动的受控增加来实现的，这与使用衰减的德拜-沃勒因子和复杂的势吸收器相反。首先将维数减少的晶格视为工作模型，该方法可使结果与文献报道的结果兼容。随后，对一个完整的三维系统进行了仿真，并将结果与​​显示该方法可靠性的实验成像进行了比较。