Measuring the three-dimensional (3D) distribution of chemistry in nanoscale matter is a longstanding challenge for metrological science. The inelastic scattering events required for 3D chemical imaging are too rare, requiring high beam exposure that destroys the specimen before an experiment completes. Even larger doses are required to achieve high resolution. Thus, chemical mapping in 3D has been unachievable except at lower resolution with the most radiation-hard materials. Here, high-resolution 3D chemical imaging is achieved near or below one nanometer resolution in a Au-Fe3O4 metamaterial, Co3O4 - Mn3O4 core-shell nanocrystals, and ZnS-Cu0.64S0.36 nanomaterial using fused multi-modal electron tomography. Multi-modal data fusion enables high-resolution chemical tomography often with 99\% less dose by linking information encoded within both elastic (HAADF) and inelastic (EDX / EELS) signals. Now sub-nanometer 3D resolution of chemistry is measurable for a broad class of geometrically and compositionally complex materials.
@article{arxiv.2304.12259,
title = {Imaging 3D Chemistry at 1 nm Resolution with Fused Multi-Modal Electron Tomography},
author = {Jonathan Schwartz and Zichao Wendy Di and Yi Jiang and Jason Manassa and Jacob Pietryga and Yiwen Qian and Min Gee Cho and Jonathan L. Rowell and Huihuo Zheng and Richard D. Robinson and Junsi Gu and Alexey Kirilin and Steve Rozeveld and Peter Ercius and Jeffrey A. Fessler and Ting Xu and Mary Scott and Robert Hovden},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.12259},
year = {2024}
}