Amorphous materials — solids lacking long-range periodic order — are vital to technologies spanning thin-film electronics, solar cells, phase-change memory, magnetic components, biomedical devices, and quantum hardware. Yet their structural disorder has long prevented full three-dimensional (3D) atomic mapping. Despite major advances in probing short- and medium-range order, experimentally determining complete 3D atomic arrangements in amorphous solids remains challenging. Atomic electron tomography (AET) now offers a route to direct 3D atomic imaging without requiring crystallinity or averaging. In a forthcoming Nature paper, Miao and collaborators present a quantitative analysis of AET, showing how coordinated preprocessing, denoising, projection alignment, normalization, tomographic reconstruction, atom tracing, elemental classification, and atomic position refinement enable reliable 3D atomic coordinate and chemical-identity determination in amorphous materials. Using multislice-simulated datasets, they demonstrate accurate 3D reconstruction of amorphous Si, SiGeSn, and CoPdPt nanoparticles with picometer-scale precision across a range of noise levels. In the CoPdPt system, for example, 95.1 percent of Co, 99.0 percent of Pd, and 100 percent of Pt atoms are correctly identified with 3D positional precisions of 29, 12, and 6 pm. These results establish practical guidelines and quantitative benchmarks for accurate AET of non-crystalline materials, and the underlying workflow provides a general framework for high-fidelity 3D reconstruction in other tomographic imaging modalities.
