As engineering properties are miniaturized by mo thinner films, crystallographic analyses become more appropriate by electron diffraction than XRD. Without synchrotron sources, XRD scans of such films often expose one peak at best. However, these thinner films become more suited for TEM, with less artifacts from sample preparation. XRD scans with peaks in the noise are quantitatively accepted, while vast differences in electron diffraction patterns remain unquantified. Digital recording of TEM information removes the uncertain hand waving of the darkroom; and fast, user-friendly computer processing especially removes the nonstatistical art in image analysis. This work inputs 16-bit (>65,000 gray levels) images of ring diffraction patterns into Digital Micrograph and utilizes a Rotation Average subroutine (1) to plot peak intensities.

Information storage in a hard drive utilizes sputtered thin films of HCP-Co-alloys with magnetic bits tied to the crystallographic orientation of each grain. Longitudinal-recording density and signal-to-noise can be enhanced for thin films with c-axes of all grains in plane.