Local coexistence of VO2 phases revealed by deep data analysis

We report a synergistic approach of micro-Raman spectroscopic mapping and deep data analysis to study the distribution of crystallographic phases and ferroelastic domains in a defected Al-doped VO2 microcrystal. Bayesian linear unmixing revealed an uneven distribution of the T phase, which is stabilized by the surface defects and uneven local doping that went undetectable by other classical analysis techniques such as PCA and SIMPLISMA. This work demonstrates the impact of information recovery via statistical analysis and full mapping in spectroscopic studies of vanadium dioxide systems, which is commonly substituted by averaging or single point-probing approaches, both of which suffer from information misinterpretation due to low resolving power.