First critical steps for understanding complex advanced materials:Synergy between X-ray diffraction and electron microscopy

摘要

Attaining novel structures in compounds displaying remarkable properties is the goal of numerous solid-state chemists and physicists.Several approaches for predicting new structures exist but,whatever they are,one of the essential steps is to understand their architecture.It needs to collect the maximum information for deciphering the building code.In this paper,we give a personal account and focus on the powerful synergy of transmission electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction techniques for achieving it.We have chosen the example of the misfit-layered cobaltites,which appear more and more complex as we attain each new level in the hierarchy of their structures.We have limited our illustration to the first period of the misfit cobaltites "research story",from the discovery of highly complex oxides to the understanding of the architecture building,without reporting on the numerous further papers devoted to iso-structural compounds and to their remarkable properties of thermoelectric power.