M3eta: An extensible metadata scheme for advanced momentum microscopy in the age of big data

Project Partners: FZJ, DESY




Photoelectron emission spectroscopy (PES) has matured into a versatile tool for characterizing the electronic properties of novel quantum materials. While historically PES was used for accessing the density of states of materials in one-dimensional energy scans, nowadays data sets provide detailed views of band dispersions and topologies, being indispensable for all fields of modern materials based sciences. The latest innovation in this field – photoelectron momentum microscopy (MM) – applies the principles of high-resolution imaging to record tomographic sections of the electronic structure in a high-dimensional parameter space. Despite the rapid world-wide adoption of MM as an universal materials characterization tool, currently no universal scheme exists to describe the highly divers set of parameters – for example, but not limited to, the momentum vector, energy, electron spin, light polarization states – that describe a MM experiment. Implementing findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) principles in momentum microscopy mandates new metadata schemes that describe the abundance of experimental parameters and thus link measured data voxels to the electronic properties of a material. The aim of M³eta is to establish such extensible and sustainable metadata scheme for momentum microscopy that will be stored in a structured file together with the measured data voxels. This will be the basis for an automated and interactive tool-chain that interprets the stored metadata and uses this information to reconstruct views of the multi-dimensional electronic structure of a material.