Prospects for the direct electron crystallographic determination of zeolite structures

Recently two successful zeolite structures based on experimental electron crystallographic data have been published. Diffraction and image data based on the silicate portion of the zeolite, mordenite, which are perturbed by dynamical (as well as secondary) scattering, have been simulated by a multiple-beam dynamical scattering program. Structure analyses with these data show that the above claims are not unreasonable, given a high enough accelerating voltage for the electron beam. If, for example, 2.9 A resolution micrographs are taken from a 120 A thick crystal in a 200 or 400 kV electron microscope, the crystallographic phases found by image analysis (Fourier filtration) are accurate enough to be extended by the Sayre equation to the (atomic) resolution limit of the electron diffraction pattern (for example from a 105 A thick crystal illuminated by a 1,200 kV electron source). The resultant potential map can be interpreted to find most of the atomic positions and the remaining ones will appear during the progress of a Fourier refinement.