Surface determination through atomically resolved secondary-electron imaging

J. Ciston (), H. G. Brown, A. J. D’Alfonso, P. Koirala, C. Ophus, Y. Lin, Y. Suzuki, H. Inada, Y. Zhu, L. J. Allen and L. D. Marks
Additional contact information
J. Ciston: National Center for Electron Microscopy, The Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
H. G. Brown: School of Physics, University of Melbourne
A. J. D’Alfonso: School of Physics, University of Melbourne
P. Koirala: Northwestern University
C. Ophus: National Center for Electron Microscopy, The Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Y. Lin: Northwestern University
Y. Suzuki: Hitachi High Technologies Corp.
H. Inada: Hitachi High Technologies Corp.
Y. Zhu: Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science, Brookhaven National Laboratory
L. J. Allen: School of Physics, University of Melbourne
L. D. Marks: Northwestern University

Nature Communications, 2015, vol. 6, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract Unique determination of the atomic structure of technologically relevant surfaces is often limited by both a need for homogeneous crystals and ambiguity of registration between the surface and bulk. Atomically resolved secondary-electron imaging is extremely sensitive to this registration and is compatible with faceted nanomaterials, but has not been previously utilized for surface structure determination. Here we report a detailed experimental atomic-resolution secondary-electron microscopy analysis of the c(6 × 2) reconstruction on strontium titanate (001) coupled with careful simulation of secondary-electron images, density functional theory calculations and surface monolayer-sensitive aberration-corrected plan-view high-resolution transmission electron microscopy. Our work reveals several unexpected findings, including an amended registry of the surface on the bulk and strontium atoms with unusual seven-fold coordination within a typically high surface coverage of square pyramidal TiO5 units. Dielectric screening is found to play a critical role in attenuating secondary-electron generation processes from valence orbitals.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms8358 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:6:y:2015:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms8358

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

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms8358

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 ().