Solving complex nanostructures with ptychographic atomic electron tomography

Philipp M. Pelz (), Sinéad M. Griffin, Scott Stonemeyer, Derek Popple, Hannah DeVyldere, Peter Ercius, Alex Zettl, Mary C. Scott and Colin Ophus ()
Additional contact information
Philipp M. Pelz: Friedrich Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, IZNF
Sinéad M. Griffin: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Scott Stonemeyer: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Derek Popple: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Hannah DeVyldere: University of California Berkeley
Peter Ercius: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Alex Zettl: University of California Berkeley
Mary C. Scott: University of California Berkeley
Colin Ophus: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Nature Communications, 2023, vol. 14, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: Abstract Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) is essential for determining atomic scale structures in structural biology and materials science. In structural biology, three-dimensional structures of proteins are routinely determined from thousands of identical particles using phase-contrast TEM. In materials science, three-dimensional atomic structures of complex nanomaterials have been determined using atomic electron tomography (AET). However, neither of these methods can determine the three-dimensional atomic structure of heterogeneous nanomaterials containing light elements. Here, we perform ptychographic electron tomography from 34.5 million diffraction patterns to reconstruct an atomic resolution tilt series of a double wall-carbon nanotube (DW-CNT) encapsulating a complex ZrTe sandwich structure. Class averaging the resulting tilt series images and subpixel localization of the atomic peaks reveals a Zr11Te50 structure containing a previously unobserved ZrTe2 phase in the core. The experimental realization of atomic resolution ptychographic electron tomography will allow for the structural determination of a wide range of beam-sensitive nanomaterials containing light elements.

Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-43634-z Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:14:y:2023:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-023-43634-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-43634-z

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().