Cryogenic Transmission Electron Microscopy Analysis and Characterization of 2D Metal-Organic Hybrid MXenes

MXenes are a large and fast-growing family of two-dimensional functional materials. MXenes (where M is transition metal, X is either carbon or nitrogen and T is a surface group) owe their large design space, and consequently their broad variety of properties, to a wide range of chemical modifications possible in M and T groups. In this contribution, we probe a new region in MXene design space by presenting a study of MXenes with organic surface groups. To conduct our analysis at electron beam dosages required for high-resolution imaging and spectroscopy we will borrow elements of CryoTEM, namely cooling our samples in-situ to liquid nitrogen temperatures. The primary instrument we will utilize is an aberration-corrected cold field emission JEOL ARM200CF operating at 200kV primary electron energy. We find that unlike MXene polymer composites which form loosely connected wavey sheets, organic terminated MXenes are highly ordered with detectable structure within organic regions.