Quantifying Nanoscale Order in Amorphous Materials via Fluctuation Electron Microscopy

The use of the STEM mode of FEM offers significant advantages in identifying artifacts in the variances. Artifacts, caused by non-idealities in the sample unrelated to nanoscale order, can easily dominate the measured variance, producing erroneous results. We show that reexamination and correction of the contributions of artifacts to variance is necessary to obtain an accurate and quantitative description of the structure of amorphous materials. Using variable resolution FEM we are able to extract a characteristic length of ordered regions in two different amorphous silicon samples. Having eliminated the noise contribution to the variance, we show here the first demonstration of a consistent characteristic length at all values of k. The experimental results presented here are the first to be consistent with both FEM theory and simulations.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Materials Science and Engineering

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2015

Author dc:creator

• Bogle, Stephanie Nicole

Contributors dc:contributor

• Abelson, John R.

• Engineering, Materials Science

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

(MiAaPQ)AAI3391887

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/82851