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Detection of single atoms and buried defects in three dimensions by aberration-corrected electron microscope with 0.5-a information limit |
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| Authors: | C Kisielowski B Freitag M Bischoff H van Lin S Lazar G Knippels P Tiemeijer M van der Stam S von Harrach M Stekelenburg M Haider S Uhlemann H Müller P Hartel B Kabius D Miller I Petrov E A Olson T Donchev E A Kenik A R Lupini J Bentley S J Pennycook I M Anderson A M Minor A K Schmid T Duden V Radmilovic Q M Ramasse M Watanabe R Erni E A Stach P Denes U Dahmen |
| Affiliation: | National Center for Electron Microscopy, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, One Cyclotron Rd., Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. |
| Abstract: | The ability of electron microscopes to analyze all the atoms in individual nanostructures is limited by lens aberrations. However, recent advances in aberration-correcting electron optics have led to greatly enhanced instrument performance and new techniques of electron microscopy. The development of an ultrastable electron microscope with aberration-correcting optics and a monochromated high-brightness source has significantly improved instrument resolution and contrast. In the present work, we report information transfer beyond 50 pm and show images of single gold atoms with a signal-to-noise ratio as large as 10. The instrument's new capabilities were exploited to detect a buried Sigma3 {112} grain boundary and observe the dynamic arrangements of single atoms and atom pairs with sub-angstrom resolution. These results mark an important step toward meeting the challenge of determining the three-dimensional atomic-scale structure of nanomaterials. |
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