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; Colin Ophus

doi:10.1038/s41467-023-43634-z

Solving complex nanostructures with ptychographic atomic electron tomography

Nat Commun. 2023 Nov 30;14(1):7906. doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-43634-z.

Authors

Philipp M Pelz^{1

2

3}, Sinéad M Griffin^{4

5}, Scott Stonemeyer^{5

6

7

8}, Derek Popple^{5

6

7

8}, Hannah DeVyldere⁹, Peter Ercius⁴, Alex Zettl^{9

5

6

8}, Mary C Scott^{9

4

5}, Colin Ophus¹⁰

Affiliations

¹ Institute of Micro- and Nanostructure Research (IMN) & Center for Nanoanalysis and Electron Microscopy (CENEM), Friedrich Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, IZNF, 91058, Erlangen, Germany. philipp.pelz@fau.de.
² Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA. philipp.pelz@fau.de.
³ The Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA. philipp.pelz@fau.de.
⁴ The Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA.
⁵ Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA.
⁶ Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute at the University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA.
⁷ Department of Chemistry, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA.
⁸ Department of Physics, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA.
⁹ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA.
¹⁰ The Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA. cophus@gmail.com.

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.

Abstract

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