LAUSR

Aberration corrected electron microscopy has made Ångstrom resolution imaging routine in labs across the world. One of the next frontiers is improving the quantitative reliability of data about materials we can extract from aberration-corrected images. We have developed a methodology based on non-rigid registration of a series of short exposure time STEM images which we call high precision STEM [1]. High precision STEM results in images in which random noise is suppressed well below the scattering generated by a single atom, and the position of atomic columns in the image can be determine to within <1 pm [1]. Other related approaches yield similar results [2, 3]. This paper presents two applications of high precision STEM imaging to the structurally complex materials with a varying number of degrees of freedom in the atomic structure.