Abstract
We explore the possibility for reconstruction of the generative physical models describing interactions between atomic units in solids from observational electron microscopy data. Here, scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) is used to observe the dynamic motion of Si atoms at the edge of monolayer graphene under continuous electron beam illumination. The resulting time-lapsed STEM images represent the snapshots of observed chemical states of the system. We use two approaches: potential of mean force calculation using a radial distribution function and a direct fitting of the graphene-Si interatomic pairwise potentials with force matching, to reconstruct the force fields in the materials. These studies lay the foundation for quantitative analysis of materials energetics from STEM data through the sampling of the metastable states in the chemical space of the system.
| Original language | English |
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| Article number | 224301 |
| Journal | Journal of Applied Physics |
| Volume | 127 |
| Issue number | 22 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jun 14 2020 |
Funding
This effort (electron microscopy, feature extraction) is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences (BES), Materials Sciences and Engineering Division (O.D., S.J., and S.V.K.) and was performed and partially supported (M.Z.) at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, which is a DOE Office of Science User Facility. Theoretical analysis (M.C. and A.D.W.) is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant Nos. 1764415 and 1751471. The authors are grateful to Dr. R. Unocic for careful reading and commenting upon the manuscript.