Complex zeolite structure solved by combining powder diffraction and electron microscopy

Many industrially important materials are polycrystalline and so most conventional methods to solve crystal structures, which require single crystals, are ineffective. Of the alternatives, transmission electron microscopy has so far solved only simple structures; and in powder diffraction the overlap of peaks with similar diffraction angles causes ambiguities in the intensities. Now, powder diffraction data applied to an algorithm incorporating phase information from high-resolution transmission electron micrographs has provided a way of solving zeolite structures using polycrystalline samples. The new technique has successfully solved the structure of zeolite TNU-9, the most complex zeolite known.