Solving complex nanostructures with ptychographic atomic electron tomography

Abstract text (incl. figure legends and references)
Knowledge of the three-dimensional atomic structure of natural and manufactured materials allows us to calculate their physical properties and deduce their function from first principles. Phase-contrast electron microscopy methods like ptychography are ideally suited to solve the 3D atomic structure of nanomaterials containing light and heavy elements. We perform mixed-state electron ptychography from 34.5 million diffraction patterns to reconstruct a high-resolution tilt series of a double wall-carbon nanotube (DW-CNT), encapsulating a complex ZrTe sandwich structure. Class averaging of the resulting reconstructions and subpixel localization of the atomic peaks in the reconstructed volume reveals the complex three-dimensional atomic structure of the core-shell heterostructure with 17 picometer precision.