Aberration-corrected STEM has become a standard analytical technique in the field of nanoscience. As “designer materials” have become more in demand in academic circles, verification of a desired product makes atomic-resolutionanalysis mandatory. Industry currently faces the same trend where tailor-made materials are customized for a given application. Here we show several examples where quantifiable atomic-scale manipulation of nanomaterials can have a dramatic impact on structure and, by extension, functionality.

A novel imaging mode for high-resolution transmission electron microscopy is described. It is based on the adjustment of a negative value of the spherical aberration CS of the objective lens of a transmission electron microscope equipped with a multipole aberration corrector system. Negative spherical aberration applied together with an overfocus yields high-resolution images with bright-atom contrast. Compared to all kinds of images taken in conventional transmission electron microscopes, where the then unavoidable positive spherical aberration is combined with an underfocus, the contrast is dramatically increased. This effect can only be understood on the basis of a full nonlinear imaging theory. Calculations show that the nonlinear contrast contributions diminish the image contrast relative to the linear image for a positive-CS setting whereas they reinforce the image contrast relative to the linear image for a negative-CS setting. The application of the new mode to the imaging of oxygen in SrTiO3 and YBa2Cu3O7 demonstrates the benefit to materials science investigations. It allows us to image directly, without further image processing, strongly scattering heavy-atom columns together with weakly scattering light-atom columns.