Abstract
To fully understand and control materials and their properties, it is of critical importance to determine their atomic structures in all three dimensions. Recent revolutionary advances in electron optics - the inventions of geometric and chromatic aberration correctors as well as electron source monochromators - have provided fertile ground for performing optical depth sectioning at atomic-scale dimensions. In this study we theoretically demonstrate the imaging of top/sub-surface atomic structures and identify the depth of single dopants, single vacancies and the other point defects within materials by large-angle illumination scanning transmission electron microscopy (LAI-STEM). The proposed method also allows us to measure specimen properties such as thickness or three-dimensional surface morphology using observations from a single crystallographic orientation.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 122-129 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | Ultramicroscopy |
| Volume | 151 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Apr 1 2015 |
Funding
R.I. acknowledges Prof. Fumiyasu Oba (Kyoto University), Dr. Nathan Lugg, Prof. Naoya Shibata and Prof. Yuichi Ikuhara (University of Tokyo) for helpful discussion careful reading of this manuscript. R.I. and Y.H. support by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas “Nano Informatics”. R.I. used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. DOE under Contract no. DE-AC02- 05CH11231 . A.R.L. is supported by the Materials Science and Engineering Division of the US Department of Energy .
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Materials Science and Engineering Division | |
| US Department of Energy | |
| U.S. Department of Energy | |
| Office of Science | |
| Japan Society for the Promotion of Science | 15K18202 |
Keywords
- Annular dark-field (ADF)
- Atomic-depth resolution imaging
- Scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM)
- Surface imaging