Anion arrangement analysis of oxynitride perovskite thin film with inverse photoelectron holography

Abstract Oxynitride perovskites are an emerging class of materials that have intriguing electrical and optical properties that can be used for a wide variety of novel applications. The arrangement of the anions significantly drives these properties, but it is difficult to assess the anion arrangements in thin film samples. Inverse photoelectron holography is an atomic resolution holography technique that can directly measure the local structure around atoms of light elements in a sample. The holograms of the anions in SrTaO 2 N thin films were obtained and a remarkable difference was found between the O and N holograms. Analysis of the holographic features and simulations suggests that the sample consists of trans-type anion ordering. A new structural model consisting of trans-type structures where the N anions are aligned in different directions was proposed, and the resulting simulated hologram agrees well with the experiment.