Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 January 2011
Vanadium oxides are materials of interest due to their electronic, magnetic and catalytic properties. In the case of V2O3 and Cu3Au, the interfacial bonding is rather difficult to describe since the two component materials have strongly different electronic structures. Thus a local investigation of the interface becomes important. In this investigation, the incoherent interface between a V2O3 (0001, corundum structure) layer and a Cu3Au (001, L12 structure) substrate is characterized with the help of image corrected high resolution electron microscopy (HRTEM) and focal series reconstruction in order to investigated both the true position of atoms and the nature of the atomic species. Semi-quantitative results can be shown for the chemical composition of columns and strains at one side of the interface.