A quantitative measure of medium-range order in amorphous materials from transmission electron micrographs

R K Dash, P M Voyles, J M Gibson, M M J Treacy, P Keblinski
2003 Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter  
We propose an extension to the technique of fluctuation electron microscopy that quantitatively measures a medium-range order correlation length in amorphous materials. In both simulated images from computer-generated paracrystalline amorphous silicon models and experimental images of amorphous silicon, we find that the spatial autocorrelation function of dark-field transmission electron micrographs of amorphous materials exhibits a simple exponential decay. The decay length measures a
more » ... -scale structural correlation length in the sample, although it also depends on the microscope resolution. We also propose a new interpretation of the fluctuation microscopy image variance in terms of fluctuations in local atomic pair distribution functions.
doi:10.1088/0953-8984/15/31/317 fatcat:ispm5thp2zh6lmxo2qrej4k4em