Efficient calculation of electron diffraction for the structural determination of nanomaterials.

A critical advance in the technique of low-energy electron diffraction is presented and shown to enable determining detailed structures of nanomaterials, based on experimental methods that already exist or have been proposed. Our new cluster approach speeds up the computation to scale as n logn, rather than the current n3 or n2, with n the number of atoms, for example. Applications are illustrated for C60 molecules adsorbed on a Cu(111) surface, with and without coadsorbed metal atoms, exhibiting sensitivity to important structural features such as buckyball size and deformation.