X-ray superlattice reflections, infrared spectroscopy, and chemical analyses have established that cetylpyridinium bromide (CPB) is highly ordered when adsorbed on vermiculite. The molecules, which stand at about 57° to the silicate surface, form close-packed arrays. Full surface coverage is achieved only for the most highly charged vermiculites. The packing within the arrays accounted for the superlattice observed and each adsorbed molecule had an area of 18.4 Å2 at the surface. The implications of these findings for the CPB method used in soil surface area studies are discussed.

As a real-space technique, atomic-resolution STEM imaging contains both amplitude and geometric phase information about structural order in materials, with the latter encoding important information about local variations and heterogeneities present in crystalline lattices. Such phase information can be extracted using geometric phase analysis (GPA), a method which has generally focused on spatially mapping elastic strain. Here we demonstrate an alternative phase demodulation technique and its application to reveal complex structural phenomena in correlated quantum materials. As with other methods of image phase analysis, the phase lock-in approach can be implemented to extract detailed information about structural order and disorder, including dislocations and compound defects in crystals. Extending the application of this phase analysis to Fourier components that encode periodic modulations of the crystalline lattice, such as superlattice or secondary frequency peaks, we extract the behavior of multiple distinct order parameters within the same image, yielding insights into not only the crystalline heterogeneity but also subtle emergent order parameters such as antipolar displacements. When applied to atomic-resolution images spanning large (~0.5 × 0.5 μm2) fields of view, this approach enables vivid visualizations of the spatial interplay between various structural orders in novel materials.

We have performed photoluminescence (PL) measurements at liquid nitrogen temperature under high pressure up to 5.5 GPa and in the temperature range 10-300 K at atmospheric pressure on {(ZnSe)30(ZnSe0.92Te0.08)30(ZnSe)30[(CdSe)1(ZnSe)2]9}x5 multiple quantum wells. The PL peaks, EB, E1 and Ew corresponding to the band edge luminescence in ZnSe barrier layer, the transitions from the first conduction subband to the heavy-hole subband in ZnSe0.92Te0.08 layers and [(CdSe)1(ZnSe)2]9 ultra short period superlattice quantum well (SPSLQW) layers have been observed. Experimental results show that ZnSe0.92Te0.08/ZnSe forms a type-I superlattice (SL) in contrast to the type-II ZnSe/ZnTe SL. The pressure coefficients of the EB, E1 and Ew exciton peaks have been determined as 67, 63 and 56 meV/GPa, respectively. With increasing temperature (or pressure), the E1 peak-intensity drastically decreases which is attributed to the thermal effect (or the appearance of many defects in ZnSe0.92Te0.08 under higher pressure).