Atomically Resolved Phase Coexistence in VO Thin Films.

Concurrent structural and electronic transformations in VO thin films are of 2-fold importance: enabling fine-tuning of the emergent electrical properties in functional devices, yet creating an intricate interfacial domain structure of transitional phases. Despite the importance of understanding the structure of VO thin films, a detailed real-space atomic structure analysis in which the oxygen atomic columns are also resolved is lacking. Moreover, intermediate atomic structures have remained elusive due to the lack of robust atomically resolved quantitative analysis.