Detecting the direction of oxygen bonding in SrTiO3

Abstract

The near-edge fine structure of an ionization edge in electron energy-loss spectroscopy provides bonding and elemental information. We investigate the fine structure of the O K edge in SrTiO3, where the oxygen atoms have identical local bonding environments in three dimensions but differ in their two-dimensional projection. By removing the effects of elastic and thermal diffuse scattering in experimental data, we demonstrate a small difference between the O columns that are nonequivalent in projection, which was not evident before the removal of scattering of the probing electrons. We explore the robustness of this method to the uncertainty in various experimental parameters. © 2013 American..