LAUSR

Picometer-scale structural distortion drives a wide range of material properties including pyroelectricity, ferroelectricity, and piezoelectricity. Further, since short-range correlations of chemistry and distortion in these systems manifest unique properties, it is crucial to quantify and understand how they contribute to material response. In this presentation, we will discuss application of the projected pair distribution function (pPDF) for identifying short-range structural correlation in STEM images. The pPDF, which is a 2D analogue of the PDF technique employed in diffraction, provides a representation of the distances between neighboring atom column pairs directly from STEM images as illustrated in Figure 1a [1]. The pPDF can be separated into partial pPDFs to investigate the distance distribution between constituent atom column types in an image [2].