MSE Seminar: “Local to Meso-scale Order in Electronic Ceramics Characterized by Aberration -Corrected Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy”

The ability to design the composition and microstructure of electronic ceramics for emerging technological applications requires sophisticated characterization techniques that can provide quantitative information about local structure and chemistry. Such structure quantification is particularly important to the fundamental understanding of properties in many important non-linear dielectrics, where chemical heterogeneities associated with dopants or intrinsic lattice defects give rise to local inhomogeneities in charge, strain and polarization. Such local deviations from the global average structure and symmetry are linked to enhancements in macroscopic dielectric and electromechanical properties. This seminar discusses the use of aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) to quantify short- and medium-range lattice disorder in electronic oxides, including ferroelectrics and relaxor ferroelectrics. The ability to quantify local structure on a sublattice basis and in real space provides unique insight into the structural complexities of these materials.