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Updated: Mar 17, 2026
Fabrication of Gate-tunable Graphene Devices for Scanning Tunneling Microscopy Studies with Coulomb Impurities
Published on: July 24, 2015
Mapping Atomic Orbitals with the Transmission Electron Microscope: Images of Defective Graphene Predicted from
Lorenzo Pardini1, Stefan Löffler2,3,4, Giulio Biddau1
1Physics Department and IRIS Adlershof, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 12489 Berlin, Germany.
Abstract:
Transmission electron microscopy has been a promising candidate for mapping atomic orbitals for a long time. Here, we explore its capabilities by a first-principles approach. For the example of defected graphene, exhibiting either an isolated vacancy or a substitutional nitrogen atom, we show that three different kinds of images are to be expected, depending on the orbital character. To judge the feasibility of visualizing orbitals in a real microscope, the effect of the optics' aberrations is simulated. We demonstrate that, by making use of energy filtering, it should indeed be possible to map atomic orbitals in a state-of-the-art transmission electron microscope.
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