TY - JOUR
T1 - In-situ electron microscopy mapping of an order-disorder transition in a superionic conductor
AU - Heo, Jaeyoung
AU - Dumett Torres, Daniel
AU - Banerjee, Progna
AU - Jain, Prashant K.
N1 - Funding Information:
Funding for this work was provided by the Energy & Biosciences Institute (EBI) through the EBI-Shell program. This work was carried out in part at the Frederick Seitz Materials Research Lab. We acknowledge the donors of the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund for support of our preliminary work. The Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) research allocation and SEAGrid computational resources were used for calculations. We acknowledge Sudhakar Pamidighantam for his support of our computations.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, The Author(s).
PY - 2019/12/1
Y1 - 2019/12/1
N2 - Solid-solid phase transitions are processes ripe for the discovery of correlated atomic motion in crystals. Here, we monitor an order-disorder transition in real-time in nanoparticles of the super-ionic solid, Cu 2−x Se. The use of in-situ high-resolution transmission electron microscopy allows the spatiotemporal evolution of the phase transition within a single nanoparticle to be monitored at the atomic level. The high spatial resolution reveals that cation disorder is nucleated at low co-ordination, high energy sites of the nanoparticle where cationic vacancy layers intersect with surface facets. Time-dependent evolution of the reciprocal lattice of individual nanoparticles shows that the initiation of cation disorder is accompanied by a ~3% compression of the anionic lattice, establishing a correlation between these two structural features of the lattice. The spatiotemporal insights gained here advance understanding of order-disorder transitions, ionic structure and transport, and the role of nanoparticle surfaces in phase transitions.
AB - Solid-solid phase transitions are processes ripe for the discovery of correlated atomic motion in crystals. Here, we monitor an order-disorder transition in real-time in nanoparticles of the super-ionic solid, Cu 2−x Se. The use of in-situ high-resolution transmission electron microscopy allows the spatiotemporal evolution of the phase transition within a single nanoparticle to be monitored at the atomic level. The high spatial resolution reveals that cation disorder is nucleated at low co-ordination, high energy sites of the nanoparticle where cationic vacancy layers intersect with surface facets. Time-dependent evolution of the reciprocal lattice of individual nanoparticles shows that the initiation of cation disorder is accompanied by a ~3% compression of the anionic lattice, establishing a correlation between these two structural features of the lattice. The spatiotemporal insights gained here advance understanding of order-disorder transitions, ionic structure and transport, and the role of nanoparticle surfaces in phase transitions.
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U2 - 10.1038/s41467-019-09502-5
DO - 10.1038/s41467-019-09502-5
M3 - Article
C2 - 30944324
AN - SCOPUS:85063944574
SN - 2041-1723
VL - 10
JO - Nature Communications
JF - Nature Communications
IS - 1
M1 - 1505
ER -