Solving complex nanostructures with ptychographic atomic electron tomography.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 38036516.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-023-43634-z and PMC identifier 10689721.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) is essential for determining atomic scale structures in structural biology and materials science. In structural biology, three-dimensional structures of proteins are routinely determined from thousands of identical particles using phase-contrast TEM. In materials science, three-dimensional atomic structures of complex nanomaterials have been determined using atomic electron tomography (AET). However, neither of these methods can determine the three-dimensional atomic structure of heterogeneous nanomaterials containing light elements. Here, we perform ptychographic electron tomography from 34.5 million diffraction patterns to reconstruct an atomic resolution tilt series of a double wall-carbon nanotube (DW-CNT) encapsulating a complex ZrTe sandwich structure. Class averaging the resulting tilt series images and subpixel localization of the atomic peaks reveals a Zr11Te50 structure containing a previously unobserved ZrTe2 phase in the core. The experimental realization of atomic resolution ptychographic electron tomography will allow for the structural determination of a wide range of beam-sensitive nanomaterials containing light elements.