Simple ePDF: A Pair Distribution Function Method Based on Electron Diffraction Patterns to Reveal the Local Structure of Amorphous and Nanocrystalline Materials

Abstract

Amorphous, glassy or disordered materials play important roles in developing structural materials from metals or ceramics, devices from semiconductors or medicines from organic compounds. Their local structure is frequently similar to crystalline ones. A computer program is presented here that runs under the Windows operating system on a PC to extract pair distribution function (PDF) from electron diffraction in a transmission electron microscope (TEM). A polynomial correction reduces small systematic deviations from the expected average Q-dependence of scattering. Neighbor distance and coordination number measurements are supplemented by either measurement or enforcement of number density. Quantification of similarity is supported by calculation of Pearson’s correlation coefficient and fingerprinting. A rough estimate of fractions in a mixture is computed by multiple least-square fitting using the PDFs from components of the mixture. PDF is also simulated from crystalline structural models (in addition to measured ones) to be used in libraries for fingerprinting or fraction estimation. Crystalline structure models for simulations are obtained from CIF files or str files of ProcessDiffraction. Data from inorganic samples exemplify usage. In contrast to previous free ePDF programs, our stand-alone program does not need a special software environment, which is a novelty. The program is available from the author upon request.