Local structure analysis of amorphous materials by angstrom-beam electron diffraction

Akihiko Hirata

doi:10.1093/jmicro/dfaa075

Local structure analysis of amorphous materials by angstrom-beam electron diffraction

Microscopy (Oxf). 2021 Mar 24;70(2):171-177. doi: 10.1093/jmicro/dfaa075.

Author

Akihiko Hirata^{1

2

3

4}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Materials Science, Waseda University, Shinjuku, Tokyo 169-8555, Japan.
² Kagami Memorial Research Institute for Materials Science and Technology, Waseda University, Shinjuku, Tokyo 169-0051, Japan.
³ WPI Advanced Institute for Materials Research, Tohoku University, Sendai, Miyagi 980-8577, Japan.
⁴ Mathematics for Advanced Materials-OIL, AIST, Sendai, Miyagi 980-8577, Japan.

Abstract

The structure analysis of amorphous materials still leaves much room for improvement. Owing to the lack of translational or rotational symmetry of amorphous materials, it is important to develop a different approach from that used for crystals for the structure analysis of amorphous materials. Here, the angstrom-beam electron diffraction method was used to obtain the local structure information of amorphous materials at a sub-nanometre scale. In addition, we discussed the relationship between the global and local diffraction intensities of amorphous structures, and verified the effectiveness of the proposed method through basic diffraction simulations. Finally, some applications of the proposed method to structural and functional amorphous materials are summarized.

Keywords: STEM; amorphous materials; electron diffraction; local structures.