Learning and Controlling Silicon Dopant Transitions in Graphene using Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy

Sub-atomically focused electron beams in scanning transmission electron microscopes (STEMs) can induce a broad spectrum of chemical changes, including defect formation, reconfiguration of chemical bonds, and dopant insertion. Several groups have shown the feasibility of direct atomic manipulation via electron beam stimulation, which holds great promise for a number of downstream applications such as material design, solid-state quantum computers, and others (Jesse et al, 2018; Susi et al, 2017b; Dyck et al, 2017; Tripathi et al, 2018; Dyck et al, 2018). One of the challenges for advances in this space is that these types of atomic manipulation rely on manual control by highly-trained experts, which is expensive and slow. The ability to accurately automate this type of beam control could thereby result in tremendous impact on the feasibility of atomic manipulation for real use cases. A critical requirement for this automation is accurate estimation of the transition dynamics of atoms when stimulated by focused electron beams.