Crystal Cartography: Mapping Nanostructure with Scanning Electron Diffraction

Nanostructure describes the network of defective and distorted atomic structure existing on the nanoscale within materials. This nanostructure bridges the gap between idealised crys- talline structure and real materials, playing a deterministic role in tailoring physico-chemical properties, as well as providing a basis for mechanistic understanding of complex processes such as mechanical deformation and phase transformation. Characterising nanostructure, to develop understanding of materials, requires experimental techniques capable of probing the structure with spatial resolution on the order of nanometres and across regions of interest up to micrometres. Recent developments in electron microscopy, enabling the acquisition of numerous diffraction patterns in a spatially resolved manner, combined with modern computational power, provides a route to meet this need as developed in this work. Scanning electron diffraction (SED) involves the acquisition of a two-dimensional elec- tron diffraction pattern at each probe position in a two-dimensional scan of a specimen. An information rich 4-dimensional (4D-SED) dataset is obtained that can be analysed extensively post-facto using a wide-range of computational methods. The acquisition of such 4D-SED data from the specimen at numerous orientations may also enable the reconstruction of nanostructure in three-dimensions via tomographic methods. In this work, methods for the acquisition and analysis of 4D-SED data are developed and applied to reveal nanostructure in two and three-dimensions. These methods are applied to various prototypical characterisation challenges in materials science, particularly: strain mapping in two and three dimensions, revealing inter-phase crystallographic relationships, mapping grains in two-dimensional materials, and probing nanostructure in polyethylene