Manipulating low-dimensional materials down to the level of single atoms with electron irradiation

Abstract

Recent advances in scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) instrumentation have made it possible to focus electron beams with sub-atomic precision and to identify the chemical structure of materials at the level of individual atoms. Here we discuss the dynamics that are observed in the structure of low-dimensional materials under electron irradiation, and the potential use of electron beams for single-atom manipulation. As a demonstration of the latter capability, we show how momentum transfer from the electrons of a 60-keV Ångström-sized STEM probe can be used to move silicon atoms embedded in the graphene lattice with atomic precision.

partly review (Fig. 1-3) and partly new results (Fig. 4-5)

References in corpus (11)

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• Electron beam nanosculpting of suspended graphene sheets
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• Silicon-carbon bond inversions driven by 60 keV electrons in graphene
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• Single-atom spectroscopy of phosphorus dopants implanted into graphene
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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Towards atomically precise manipulation of 2D nanostructures in the electron microscope
• Mechanism of electron-beam manipulation of single dopant atoms in silicon
• Deep analytics of atomically-resolved images: manifest and latent features
• Robust multi-scale multi-feature deep learning for atomic and defect identification in Scanning Tunneling Microscopy on H-Si(100) 2x1 surface