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TopoTEM: A Python Package for Quantifying and Visualizing Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy Data of Polar Topologies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2022

Eoghan N. O'Connell ,
Kalani Moore ,
Elora McFall ,
Michael Hennessy Open the ORCID record for Michael Hennessy [Opens in a new window] ,
Eoin Moynihan ,
Ursel Bangert  and
Michele Conroy Open the ORCID record for Michele Conroy [Opens in a new window]
Eoghan N. O'Connell
Affiliation:
Department of Physics, Bernal Institute, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland
Kalani Moore
Affiliation:
Department of Physics, Bernal Institute, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland
Elora McFall
Affiliation:
Department of Physics, Bernal Institute, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland
Michael Hennessy
Affiliation:
Department of Physics, Bernal Institute, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland
Eoin Moynihan
Affiliation:
Department of Physics, Bernal Institute, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland
Ursel Bangert
Affiliation:
Department of Physics, Bernal Institute, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland
Michele Conroy*
Affiliation:
Department of Physics, Bernal Institute, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland Department of Materials, Faculty of Engineering, London Centre of Nanotechnology, Imperial College London, London, UK
*
*Corresponding author: Michele Conroy, E-mail: m.conroy@imperial.ac.uk
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Abstract

The exotic internal structure of polar topologies in multiferroic materials offers a rich landscape for materials science research. As the spatial scale of these entities is often subatomic in nature, aberration-corrected transmission electron microscopy (TEM) is the ideal characterization technique. Software to quantify and visualize the slight shifts in atomic placement within unit cells is of paramount importance due to the now routine acquisition of images at such resolution. In the previous ~decade since the commercialization of aberration-corrected TEM, many research groups have written their own code to visualize these polar entities. More recently, open-access Python packages have been developed for the purpose of TEM atomic position quantification. Building on these packages, we introduce the TEMUL Toolkit: a Python package for analysis and visualization of atomic resolution images. Here, we focus specifically on the TopoTEM module of the toolkit where we show an easy to follow, streamlined version of calculating the atomic displacements relative to the surrounding lattice and thus plotting polarization. We hope this toolkit will benefit the rapidly expanding field of topology-based nano-electronic and quantum materials research, and we invite the electron microscopy community to contribute to this open-access project.

Keywords

open sourcepolarizationpythonSTEMtopology
Type
Software and Instrumentation
Information
Microscopy and Microanalysis , Volume 28 , Issue 4 , August 2022 , pp. 1444 - 1452
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Microscopy Society of America

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Footnotes

†

Current address: Max-Planck Institute for the Science of Light & Max-Planck-Zentrum für Physik und Medizin, Erlangen, Germany.

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