Strain study of gold nanomaterials as HR-TEM calibration standard

This work presents the use of high resolution electron microscopy (HREM) and geometric phase analysis (GPA) to measure the interplanar spacing and strain distribution of three gold nanomaterials, respectively. The results showed that the {1 1 1} strain was smaller than the {0 0 2} strain for any kind of gold materials at the condition of same measuring method. The 0.65% of {1 1 1} strain in gold film measured by HREM (0.26% measured by GPA) was smaller than the {1 1 1} strains in two gold particles. The presence of lattice strain was interpreted according to the growth mechanism of metallic thin film. It is deduced that the {1 1 1} interplanar spacing of the gold thin film is suitable for high magnification calibration of transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and the gold film is potential to be a new calibration standard of TEM.