High-resolution transmission electron microscopy and spectroscopy of epitaxial metal oxides

Quantitative determination of local atomic and electronic structures at surfaces, interfaces, and defects and elucidation of their dynamics and influences on materials, nanostructures, and devices, thereby to develop structure–property relationships at the atomic level remains the ultimate goal of microscopy in materials sciences. The reigning paradigms are imaging and spectroscopy techniques based on aberration-corrected transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Aberration-corrected TEM provides scientists great opportunities to routinely resolve structural details, to map both compositional and bonding information, and to explore properties of thin films at the atomic scale. In chapter 13, we introduce first imaging and spectroscopic techniques based on both the conventional coherent and the scanning imaging modes of current state-of-the-art aberration-corrected transmission electron microscopes. We show then examples for application of these techniques in characterization of structural, compositional, and bonding details of interfaces and defects in thin films of metal oxides at the atomic scale.