Analysis of electron beam damage of exfoliated MoS2 sheets and quantitative HAADF-STEM imaging

Abstract

In this work we examined MoS2sheets by aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron micro-scopy (STEM) at three different energies: 80, 120 and 200 kV. Structural damage of the MoS2sheets hasbeen controlled at 80 kV according a theoretical calculation based on the inelastic scattering of theelectrons involved in the interaction electron–matter. The threshold energy for the MoS2material hasbeen found and experimentally verified in the microscope. At energies higher than the energy thresholdwe show surface and edge defects produced by the electron beam irradiation. Quantitative analysis atatomic level in the images obtained at 80 kV has been performed using the experimental images and viaSTEM simulations using SICSTEM software to determine the exact number of MoS2layers.