Convergent beam electron diffraction of multilayer van der Waals structures

Abstract

Convergent beam electron diffraction is routinely applied for studying deformation and local strain in thick crystals by matching the crystal structure to the observed intensity distributions. Recently, it has been demonstrated that CBED can be applied for imaging two-dimensional (2D) crystals where a direct reconstruction is possible and three-dimensional crystal deformations at a nanometre resolution can be retrieved. Here, we demonstrate that second-order effects allow for further information to be obtained regarding stacking arrangements between the crystals. Such effects are especially pronounced in samples consisting of multiple layers of 2D crystals. We show, using simulations and experiments, that twisted multilayer samples exhibit extra modulations of interference fringes in CBED patterns, i. e., a CBED moiré. A simple and robust method for the evaluation of the composition and the number of layers from a single-shot CBED pattern is demonstrated.

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Three-dimensional structure from single two-dimensional diffraction intensity measurement
• Holographic reconstruction of the interlayer distance of bilayer two-dimensional crystal samples from their convergent beam electron diffraction patterns
• Imaging defects in two-dimensional crystals by convergent beam electron diffraction
• Considerations for extracting moiré-level strain from dark field intensities in transmission electron microscopy
• Holographic convergent electron beam diffraction (CBED) imaging of two-dimensional crystals
• Dynamics of single Au nanoparticles on graphene simultaneously in real- and diffraction space by time-series convergent beam electron diffraction