Examining the Relationship between Dislocations and Nanoparticle Morphology

Defects play an important role in the growth and properties of materials at all length scales. At the nanoscale in particular, dislocations can relieve epitaxial strain, enable growth mechanisms such as spiral growth, and form small angle grain boundaries affecting both particle morphology and material properties. The study of dislocations is often performed with transmission electron microscopy techniques (TEM). However, TEM requires destructive sample preparation and only provides information on the sample in 2 dimensions. Coherent Diffractive Imaging is a technique that uses coherent x-rays to non-destructively probe the lattice of a crystal in 3 dimensions, allowing us to characterize single dislocations throughout the volume of the crystal. While the identification of dislocations using this technique is established in the literature [1], its insight into the relationship between the identifies defects and the crystal shape is underexplored. This work will present a numerical analysis of one such imaging of a semiconducting nanocrystal, showing how the 3-dimensional information provided using coherent imaging can be directly linked to particle morphology.

[1] - Z. Barringer, et al. CrystEngComm 23, 6239 (2021).