Every electron picks a fate. Most of them pick chaos.
Every electron that enters your specimen picks a fate: it sails through untouched, bounces off a nucleus, rings the electron gas, or knocks out a core electron. Each fate leaves a different fingerprint in the diffraction pattern (reciprocal space) and the image (real space), and each one is either your signal or your artifact, depending on what you asked the microscope to do.
Pick a channel. For each one: how strongly it deflects the electron (angle), how much energy it steals (loss), what it paints in reciprocal space, what it does to the image in real space, and whether it is signal, artifact, or both.
All channels act at once in a real experiment. Drive the specimen and the cleanup knobs below and watch the selected-area diffraction pattern and the bright-field image respond together. Each toggle mimics an experimental choice that suppresses or separates one contribution on the real machine; whether a channel is artifact or signal depends on the experiment (TDS is background here and data to a phonon spectroscopist).
Field guide to the things that show up in your data that you did not order. Each card: the symptom as you would see it, the scattering physics behind it, and the cure. The micrographs are simulated to show each artifact in isolation. Each card links to real published examples.
No scattering channel is intrinsically an artifact: "artifact" just means a channel you didn't ask for, contaminating the channel you did. The same plasmon that fogs your diffraction pattern is the signal in low-loss EELS.
@misc{tripathy2026scatteringinthetem,
author = {Tripathy, Manisha},
title = {Scattering in the TEM: One Beam, Many Fates},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://untetheredatom.com/tem/tem-scattering-guide}},
note = {Interactive teaching resource}
}