Ultrafast electron diffraction tomography for structure determination of the new zeolite ITQ-58

In this work a new ultrafast data collection strategy for electron diffraction tomography is presented that allows reducing data acquisition time by one order of magnitude. This methodology minimizes the radiation damage of beam-sensitive materials, such as microporous materials. This method, combined with the precession of the electron beam, provides high quality data enabling the determination of very complex structures. Most importantly, the implementation of this new electron diffraction methodology is easily affordable in any modern electron microscope. As a proof of concept, we have solved a new highly complex zeolitic structure named ITQ-58, with a very low symmetry (triclinic) and a large unit cell volume (1874.6 Å), containing 16 silicon and 32 oxygen atoms in its asymmetric unit, which would be very difficult to solve with the state of the art techniques.The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support of European Research Council (ERC-2014-AdG ref 671093 “MATching zeolite SYNthesis with CATalytic activity”), Spanish Government (MAT2015-71842-P (MINECO/FEDER), MAT2012-38567-C02-01 and Severo Ochoa SEV-2012-0267), and Generalitat Valenciana (Project Prometeo). E.M. was also supported by the Italian project FIR2013 Exploring the Nanoworld.Peer Reviewe