Ultrafast Electron Diffraction Tomography for Structure Determination of the New Zeolite ITQ-58

In
this work a new ultrafast data collection strategy for electron
diffraction tomography is presented that allows reducing data acquisition
time by one order of magnitude. This methodology minimizes the radiation
damage of beam-sensitive materials, such as microporous materials.
This method, combined with the precession of the electron beam, provides
high quality data enabling the determination of very complex structures.
Most importantly, the implementation of this new electron diffraction
methodology is easily affordable in any modern electron microscope.
As a proof of concept, we have solved a new highly complex zeolitic
structure named ITQ-58, with a very low symmetry (triclinic) and a
large unit cell volume (1874.6 Å3), containing 16
silicon and 32 oxygen atoms in its asymmetric unit, which would be
very difficult to solve with the state of the art techniques.