Towards three-dimensional structural determination of amorphous materials at atomic resolution

Through numerical experiments, we demonstrate an electron tomography method for three-dimensional (3D) structural determination of amorphous materials at atomic resolution. By combining multislice simulations of an aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscope with equally sloped tomography, we have determined the 3D atomic structure of a simulated glass particle, consisting of 334 Si and 668 O atoms, from a tilt series of 55 noisy projections. An atomic model refinement method has been implemented to locate the positions of the Si and O atoms in the reconstruction. We expect that the development of this general method will find applications across several disciplines in the physical sciences.