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Atomic electron tomography in three and four dimensions

MRS Bulletin volume 45, pages 290–297 (2020)Cite this article

Abstract

Atomic electron tomography (AET) has become a powerful tool for atomic-scale structural characterization in three and four dimensions. It provides the ability to correlate structures and properties of materials at the single-atom level. With recent advances in data acquisition methods, iterative three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction algorithms, and post-processing methods, AET can now determine 3D atomic coordinates and chemical species with sub-Angstrom precision, and reveal their atomic-scale time evolution during dynamical processes. Here, we review the recent experimental and algorithmic developments of AET and highlight several groundbreaking experiments, which include pinpointing the 3D atom positions and chemical order/disorder in technologically relevant materials and capturing how atoms rearrange during early nucleation at four-dimensional atomic resolution.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by STROBE, A National Science Foundation Science & Technology Center (DMR-1548924), the Office of Basic Energy Sciences of the US DOE (DE-SC0010378), an Army Research Office MURI Grant on Ab Initio Solid-State Quantum Materials: Design, Production and Characterization at the Atomic Scale (18057522), and the Division of Materials Research of the US NSF (DMR-1437263). P.E. is supported by the Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which is supported by the US Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02–05CH11231. Y.Y. acknowledges support by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) Grant funded by the Korean Government (MEST) (No. 2019R1F1A1058236).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics and Astronomy, and California NanoSystems Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

    Jihan Zhou & Jianwei Miao

  2. Department of Physics, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Republic of Korea

    Yongsoo Yang

  3. National Center for Electron Microscopy, Molecular Foundry Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA

    Peter Ercius

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  1. Jihan Zhou
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Zhou, J., Yang, Y., Ercius, P. et al. Atomic electron tomography in three and four dimensions. MRS Bulletin 45, 290–297 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1557/mrs.2020.88

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