Single-atom spectroscopy of low-dimensional materials with interrupted
periodicities
Kazu Suenaga
Nanotube Research Center, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and
Technology (AIST), 1-1-1 Higashi, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8565, Japan
In the Nanotube Research Center at AIST, we have been developing the top-level
facilities of electron microscopy which enable the atomic resolution analysis of
low-dimensional materials. Point defects and edge structures of graphene have been
intensively studied with atomic precision in the last decade [1-4]. Because the studies of
atomic defects and boundaries are of general interest in the fundamental researches and
becoming more and more crucial for technological applications of any nanoscale materials,
the atomic scale studies can be also expanded to the other low-dimensional materials.
Here I demonstrate some examples for atomic-scale imaging and spectroscopy of
various low-dimensional materials with interrupted periodicities. Vacancies and edges with
radical bonds are also successfully assigned in h-BN [5, 6, 7]. Doping and boundary
behaviors of single-layered dichalcogenides (MX2) are intensively studied because they
indeed govern the phase transition behaviors between 2H and 1T phases [8, 9]. An in situ
observation of transport properties of individual nanowires is also successfully demonstrated
[10].
[1] A. Hashimoto et al., Nature, 430 (2004) pp.870-873
[2] K. Suenaga et al., Nature Nanotech., 2 (2007) pp.358-360
[3] Z. Liu, K. Suenaga, P. Harris and S. Iijima, Phys. Rev. Lett., 102 (2009) 015501
[4] K. Suenaga and M. Koshino, Nature 468, 1088-1090 (2010).
[5] C. Jin et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 102, 195505 (2009)
[6] K. Suenaga, H. Kobayashi, and M. Koshino, Phys. Rev. Lett., 108 075501 (2012).
[7] O. Cretu, YC. Lin and K. Suenaga, Nanolett., 14 (2014) pp.1064-1068
[8] YC. Lin et al., Adv. Mater., 26 (2014) pp.2857-2861
[9] YC. Lin et al., Nature Nanotechnology, 9 (2014) pp.391-396
[10] J. Lin et al., Nature Nanotechnology, 9 (2014) pp. 436-442
[11] The work is partially supported by JST Research Acceleration Programme.