Beyond conventional chemical mapping: prospects and challenges of orbital mapping

It is well-known that core-loss EELS data contains not only information about the chemical elements present in the sample, but also about the scattering atoms" chemical environment, which manifests itself in the near-edge fine structure (ELNES). This enables some more advanced characterization techniques such as the fingerprinting of chemical compounds and the mapping of oxidation states. In this work, we explore the possibilities of fine structure mapping at "sub-atomic" spatial resolution, i.e., the real-space mapping of transitions to individual orbitals such as pz or dxy inside the sample.