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Journal of Electron Microscopy Advance Access originally published online on March 17, 2009
Journal of Electron Microscopy 2009 58(3):223-244; doi:10.1093/jmicro/dfp007
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Japanese Society of Microscopy. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

This article appears in the following Journal of Electron Microscopy issue: Special number: Advanced electron microscopy in materials physics [View the issue table of contents]

Application of two-dimensional crystallography and image processing to atomic resolution Z-contrast images

David G. Morgan1,*, Quentin M. Ramasse2 and Nigel D. Browning3,4

1 Nano-Fabrication Center, Department of Chemistry, Indiana University, 800 E. Kirkwood Ave., Bloomington, IN 47405
2 National Center for Electron Microscopy, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, 1 Cyclotron Road, Berkeley, CA 94720
3 Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, University of California at Davis, One Shields Ave., Davis, CA 95616
4 Chemistry, Materials, Earth and Life Sciences Directorate, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 7000 East Ave., Livermore, CA 94550, USA

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: dagmorga{at}indiana.edu

Zone axis images recorded using high-angle annular dark-field scanning transmission electron microscopy (HAADF-STEM or Z-contrast imaging) reveal the atomic structure with a resolution that is defined by the probe size of the microscope. In most cases, the full images contain many sub-images of the crystal unit cell and/or interface structure. Thanks to the repetitive nature of these images, it is possible to apply standard image processing techniques that have been developed for the electron crystallography of biological macromolecules and have been used widely in other fields of electron microscopy for both organic and inorganic materials. These methods can be used to enhance the signal-to-noise present in the original images, to remove distortions in the images that arise from either the instrumentation or the specimen itself and to quantify properties of the material in ways that are difficult without such data processing. In this paper, we describe briefly the theory behind these image processing techniques and demonstrate them for aberration-corrected, high-resolution HAADF-STEM images of Si46 clathrates developed for hydrogen storage.

Keywords     Z-contrast images, image processing, atomic resolution, 2D crystallography, zone axis images

Received      7 January 2009, accepted 23 January 2009


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