Application of X-ray Diffraction and Electron Crystallography for Solving Complex Structure Problems

All crystalline materials in nature, whether inorganic, organic, or biological, macroscopic or microscopic, have their own chemical and physical properties, which strongly depend on their atomic structures. Therefore, structure determination is extremely important in chemistry, physics, materials science, etc. In the past centuries, many techniques have been developed for structure determination. The most widely used one is X-ray crystallography (single-crystal X-ray diffraction (SCXRD) and powder X-ray diffraction (PXRD)), and it remains the most important technique for structure determination of crystalline materials. Although SCXRD and PXRD are successful in many cases, a number of reasons limit their applications, such as SCXRD for nanosized crystals, intergrowth, and defects and PXRD for complex structures, multiphasic samples, impurities, peak overlaps, etc. Another most valuable technique for structure determination is electron crystallography (EC). With the electron as a probe, EC alone can also be used for structure determination, especially for crystals that are too small to be studied by SCXRD or too complex for PXRD. As electrons interact much more strongly with matter than X-rays do, both electron diffraction (ED) patterns and high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) images can be obtained from nanosized crystals. However, collecting a complete set of ED patterns or recording a good HRTEM image requires considerable expertise on the operation of electron microscopes and crystallography. The strong interactions between electrons and materials can also lead to dynamical effects and beam damage. These difficulties make structure determination from ED patterns and HRTEM images not straightforward. Recently, two three-dimensional (3D) electron diffraction techniques, automated electron diffraction tomography (ADT) and rotation electron diffraction (RED), have been developed, which perform the data collection in an automated manner. Although the dynamical effects in the newly developed 3D electron diffraction techniques (ADT, RED) are reduced significantly, for some structures there are still problems with obtaining an initial model because of beam damage. The X-ray diffraction and EC methods discussed above are both powerful techniques but have their own limitations. In many complicated cases, one technique alone is not enough to solve the crystal structure, and different techniques that supply complementary structural information have to support each other for the complete structure determination. In this Account, we provide a summary of the advantages and disadvantages of X-ray diffraction (PXRD and SCXRD) and EC (HRTEM and ED) for structure determination and include a review of applications of X-ray diffraction and EC for solving complex structure problems such as peak overlap, impurities, pseudosymmetry and twinning, disordered frameworks, locating guests, aperiodic structures, etc. Some of the latest advances in structure determination are also presented briefly, namely, revealing hydrogen positions by ED, protein crystal structure solution by 3D electron diffraction, and structure determination using an X-ray free electron laser (XFEL).