Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy based Atomic Scale Fabrication Enhanced by In-operando Optical and Thermal Excitation

The scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) has been at forefront of providing atomic resolution structural and functional imaging of materials. This is made possible by a combination of highly tuned electron optics which focus the electron beam to sub-Angstrom levels, scanning systems which can rapidly and accurately steer the beam, and extremely sensitive detectors and spectrometers that allow one to measure the flux, scattering, and energy of transmitted electrons. More recently, it has been shown that this same remarkable system can be used as a platform to induce material transformations controllably, thus enabling new opportunities to fabricate structures at the atomic scale. We have recently worked to enhance these fabrication capabilites by developing methods that to locally heat the sample or nearby materials while in the microscope using current or optical excitation to influence the mobility of defects, adatoms, or nanoparticles or to induce melting, evaporation, or ablation of material that can be used as dopants. This presentation will discuss recent results to create ordered arrays of dopants in single layer 2D materials with the ultimate goal of building, from the atomic scale up, materials systems for quantum information science applications.