Advanced Measurements on the Nanoscale Enabled by Technique Development in the Scanning Transmission Electron Microscope

With recent advances in in-situ microscopy, a new era in microscopy has arrived that allows for the dynamic imaging of materials under reaction conditions in the (scanning) transmission electron microscope ((S)TEM). It is no longer sufficient to image materials under vacuum conditions, but to get closer to the conditions in which the material will be used, such as high temperature, liquid environments, gas environments, or a combination thereof. Combining an in-situ or ex-situ experiment with electron tomography is a very powerful method for materials characterization as this provides the 3-D morphology/chemistry of the materials in more relevant environments. Recent advances in both the fields of in-situ imaging and 3-D imaging are now making it possible to work towards 3-D in-situ imaging. This talk will focus on new developments such as in-situ heating in liquid, new reconstruction algorithms for electron tomography with significantly fewer images, and chemical composition in 3-D through EDX tomography in the STEM. The benefits and limitations of these methods will be discussed, with an outlook on working towards combining them.