Evolution of order in amorphous-to-crystalline phase transformation of MgF2

Structural disorder and distortion play a significant role in phase transformations. Experimentally, electron diffraction in the transmission electron microscope offers the ability to characterize disorder via the pair distribution function (PDF) at high spatial resolution. In this work, energy-filtered in situ electron diffraction is applied to measure PDFs of different phases of MgF2 from the amorphous deposit through metastable modifications to the thermodynamically stable phase.