Growth and Characterization of Well-Aligned RuO2/R-TiO2 Heteronanostructures on Sapphire (100) Substrates by Reactive Magnetron Sputtering

We report the growth of well-aligned RuO2/R-TiO2 heteronanostructures on sapphire (100) substrates by reactive magnetron sputtering using Ti and Ru metal targets under different conditions. The surface morphology and structural properties of the as-deposited heteronanostructures were characterized using field-emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and selected-area electron diffractometry (SAED). The FESEM micrographs and XRD patterns indicated the growth of vertically aligned RuO2(001) nanotubes and twinned V-shaped RuO2(101) nanowedges (NWs) on top of R-TiO2 nanorods under different sputtering pressures. TEM and SAED characterizations of the V-shaped RuO2 NWs showed that the NWs are crystalline RuO2 with twin planes of (101) and twin direction of [ 01] at the V-junction.

The quantitative analysis of electrostatic potential and study of chemical bonding by electron diffraction structure analysis

The development of the electron diffractometry methods jointly the analytical methods of electrostatic potential (ESP) reconstruction and its topological analysis allowd one to proceed to the quality new level of electron diffraction structure analysis (EDSA): investigation inner crystalline electrostatic field, which knowledge permitts to study the relation of the atomic structure with physical properties of crystals. The review of the last achivements in this direction, obtained in the Institute of Crystallography of Russian Academy of Sciences, in which EDSA method was discovered, is done. The possibility of the EDSA method to solve precise problems of quantitative analysis of the electrostatic potential is shown on the examples of investigations of the ESP distributions and chemical bonding in crystals with NaCl-type structure and covalent crystal Ge. It is also shown that quantitative data on the potential distribution considerably enlarge conceptions on the nature of interatomic and inetrmolecular interactions in crystals.