EXTENDING THE LIMIT OF ATOMIC LEVEL GRAIN-BOUNDARY STRUCTURE IMAGING USING HIGH-RESOLUTION ELECTRON-MICROSCOPY

It has been possible to image SIGMA = 21/[111]21.8-degrees tilt boundaries in thin Au films and to deduce their atomic arrangements. These results represent an electron microscopic resolution level of 1.43 angstrom, attainable with a small amount of image processing, which produces interpretable structure images. This substantial improvement over other recent grain boundary studies, which required about 1.9-2.0 angstrom resolution, clearly demonstrates that many more tilt grain boundary orientations are now accessible instead of a limited subset.