Fig. 3: Gold islands on MoS₂ reconstructions.

a Ptychographic reconstructed exit wave for 20 keV electrons transmitted through gold islands on few-layer MoS₂. b Amplitude of the Fourier transform (FT) of the intensity of the reconstructed exit wave (gamma adjusted to 0.9, upper and lower 1% of pixels saturated, with linear colour-scale at the lower right). c Amplitude and (d) phase-amplitude images of the region outlined in yellow in the upper right of (a). e Line profile of the reconstructed amplitude in the region marked with a red line and enclosed within the yellow ellipse in panel (c). Scalebars: a – 10 nm, b – 1 Å⁻¹, c – 1 nm, d – 1 nm. The phase and amplitude of the complex quantities in (a and d) are presented using a colour scale, which is inset in (d). Here ϕ represents the phase in radians, and A_max is the maximum presented amplitude of the reconstructed images. The amplitude image presented in (c) was cropped from the full field of view amplitude image, where the upper and lower 1% of pixel values were saturated and linear grey-scale value mapping is used for the amplitude between 0.2 and A_max = 4.1.