Designing Energy Materials via Atomic-resolution Microscopy and Spectroscopy

Abstract

In recent years, our sensitivity for imaging and spectroscopy has dramatically improved due to aberration correction, greatly assisting the correlation of atomic-scale structure and bonding to materials' properties. Trial and error materials' development is increasingly being replaced by atomic scale engineering, informed by the powerful combination of microscopy and theoretical calculations. Here we present some recent applications of this approach to catalysts, batteries and thermoelectric materials.

Seeing Structural Mechanisms of Optimized Piezoelectric and Thermoelectric Bulk Materials through Structural Defect Engineering

“…AC-(S)TEM has grown to be a powerful characterization platform for various types of materials [7,79,88,90,91,[107][108][109][110][111][112]. Due to the feasibility of obtained multiple images and spectra at the same time, AC-(S)TEM could provide a variety of capabilities for accurate atomic imaging and mapping of chemical and electronic structures [88,90,91].These techniques are indispensable to observing and adjusting for all defects at the atomic scale, and are therefore invaluable for materials research [88,89,91,92].…”