Transmission Electron Microscopy: Applications in Nanotechnology

Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) offers multiple advanced techniques such as imaging, diffraction, and spectroscopy to learn essential information about the physical, chemical, and structural properties of materials at the microscale to nanoscale to atomic scale. It is a critical tool for studies of sizes, shapes, defects, crystal and surface structures, compositions, and electronic states of nanometer-size areas of thin films, nanoparticles, and nanostructured systems. This article first gives a brief introduction to the TEM-based techniques. It then highlights recent application examples of TEM in the studies of nanostructured heat-assisted magnetic materials, electronics, and photovoltaics to illustrate the critical role of the TEM techniques in various research and development fields of nanoscience and nanotechnology.