Analysis of Nanodomain Composition in High-Impact Polypropylene by Atomic Force Microscopy-Infrared.

In this paper, compositions of nanodomains in a commercial high-impact polypropylene (HIPP) were investigated by an atomic force microscopy-infrared (AFM-IR) technique. An AFM-IR quantitative analysis method was established for the first time, which was then employed to analyze the polyethylene content in the nanoscopic domains of the rubber particles dispersed in the polypropylene matrix. It was found that the polyethylene content in the matrix was close to zero and was high in the rubbery intermediate layers, both as expected.

Quantitative dopant distributions in GaAs nanowires using atom probe tomography.

Controllable doping of semiconductor nanowires is critical to realize their proposed applications, however precise and reliable characterization of dopant distributions remains challenging. In this article, we demonstrate an atomic-resolution three-dimensional elemental mapping of pristine semiconductor nanowires on growth substrates by using atom probe tomography to tackle this major challenge. This highly transferrable method is able to analyze the full diameter of a nanowire, with a depth resolution better than 0.

Full tip imaging in atom probe tomography.

Atom probe tomography (APT) is capable of simultaneously revealing the chemical identities and three dimensional positions of individual atoms within a needle-shaped specimen, but suffers from a limited field-of-view (FOV), i.e., only the core of the specimen is effectively detected.