Challenges of Electron Correlation Microscopy on Amorphous Silicon and Amorphous Germanium

Electron correlation microscopy experiments were conducted on amorphous germanium (a-Ge) and amorphous silicon (a-Si) with the goal to study self-diffusion. For this purpose, a series of tilted dark-field images were acquired during in situ heating of the samples in a transmission electron microscope. These experiments show that the measurements are greatly affected by artefacts. Contamination, crystallization, electron beam-induced sputtering, and macroscopic bending of the samples pose major obstacles to the measurements. Other, more subtle experimental artefacts could occur in addition to these which makes interpretations regarding the structural dynamics nearly impossible. The data were nonetheless evaluated to see if some useful information could be extracted. One such result is that the distribution of the characteristic times τ(KWW⁠), which were obtained from stretched exponential fits to the intensity autocorrelation data, is spatially heterogeneous. This spatial heterogeneity is assumed to be caused by a potential nonergodicity of the materials, the artefacts or an inhomogeneous amorphous structure. Further data processing shows that the characteristic times τ(KWW) are moreover temperature independent, especially for the a-Ge data. It is concluded that the structural rearrangements over time are primarily electron beam-driven and that diffusive dynamics are too slow to be measured at the chosen, experimentally accessible annealing temperatures.