Journal article

Surface determination through atomically resolved secondary-electron imaging

J Ciston, HG Brown, AJ D'Alfonso, P Koirala, C Ophus, Y Lin, Y Suzuki, H Inada, Y Zhu, LJ Allen, LD Marks

Nature Communications | Published : 2015

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 ab..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Grants

Awarded by Basic Energy Sciences


Funding Acknowledgements

We acknowledge Mark Asta, Axel van de Walle, Oliver Warschkow, George Schatz and A. K. Rajagopal for useful discussions. L.D.M. and Y.L. acknowledge funding by the DOE on Grant No. DE-FG02-01ER45945; P.K. acknowledges funding by the NSF on grant number DMR-1206320. Y.Z. acknowledges funding by the DOE, Basic Energy Science, Material Science and Engineering Division under Contract No. DE-AC02-98CH10886. A portion of the electron microscopy experiments were performed at the NCEM facility of the Molecular Foundry, which is supported by the Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract DE-AC02-05CH11231. This research was also supported under the Discovery Projects funding scheme of the Australian Research Council (Project No. DP110102228) and by a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award from the Australian Research Council (Project No. DE130100739).