Examples on the happy marriage between low-voltage TEM and low-dimensional materials

“The world is made of atoms”, we know since Demokrit but we just learnt from the Nobel Laudate Geim and Novoselev in 2010 that atom’s regular arrangement in 2 dimensions is stable forming materials with extraordinary properties. Here we start to fulfill the request by Goethe to “perceive whatever holds the world together in its inmost folds”, as hardware aberration correction is now available even for lower voltage transmission electron microscopy. We begin to “see those little atoms that move around in perpetual motion distantly”, Feynman dreamed, about back in 1956.
In fact, in situ transmission electron microscopy nowadays can provide experimental data on the level of a single atom, as it has seen extremely rapid developments in recent years owing to ground-breaking advances in electron optics, electron detectors, sample preparation, sample manipulation, data analysis, and quantum-mechanical calculations of material’s properties. In this talk we will focus on our own development performed within the frame of the SALVE (Sub-Angstrom Low-Voltage Electron microscopy) project and present recent results using the chromatic and spherical aberration-corrected SALVE instrument to study and manipulate 2D inorganic (and 2D organic) materials. We will understand that low-voltage TEM and low-dimensional materials are just made for each other enabling for the first time that the material's properties can be manipulated and exactly determined on the level of single missing atoms.