A rich research history exists for crystalline growth by vapor–liquid–solid (VLS) methods, but not for amorphous growth. Yet VLS growth in the absence of crystallographic influences provides an ideal laboratory for exploring surface energy effects, including the role of line tension. We discuss the growth of amorphous silica nanowires from indium droplets by a modified VLS method. Multiple strands issue from each droplet, each strand having <1% (i.e., < 5 nm) of the radius of the droplet. We analyze the surface forces for this system, including line tension, and combine data in a novel way to estimate the surface energy of silica, the interfacial energy of liquid indium on silica, and the line tension at the three-phase boundary. The results suggest that the growth of these silica strands would be impossible without the presence of a negative line tension that also serves to stabilize the strand radii against perturbation.

We evaluate the probe forming capability of a JEOL 2200FS transmission electron microscope equipped with a spherical aberration (Cs) probe corrector. The achievement of a real space sub-Angstrom (0.1 nm) probe for scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) imaging is demonstrated by acquisition and modeling of high-angle annular dark-field STEM images. We show that by optimizing the illumination system, large probe currents and large collection angles for electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS) can be combined to yield EELS fine structure data spatially resolved to the atomic scale. We demonstrate the probe forming flexibility provided by the additional lenses in the probe corrector in several ways, including the formation of nanometer-sized parallel beams for nanoarea electron diffraction, and the formation of focused probes for convergent beam electron diffraction with a range of convergence angles. The different probes that can be formed using the probe corrected STEM opens up new applications for electron microscopy and diffraction.