Applications of In-situ Environmental Transmission Electron Microscopy equipped with liquid cell in various fields

Since its development, conventional transmission electron microscopy (CTEM) has long been an indispensable tool for wide range of various fields of research. Through the decades, TEM has undergone a number of revolutions, such as: development of cryogenic TEM, in-situ TEM Equipped with gas or liquid cell, aberration correction for atomic level imaging, and so on. One of the most important developments is the ability to observe and image specimens in liquid phase with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution. Maybe you ask yourself why do we want to image a sample in liquid environment? To answer this question we need to first understand the limitations of CTEM. CTEM requires the sample be stable in high vacuum, thus samples must be dried, which works well for some materials but not all of them. In order to endure UHV specification of CTEM, other materials must be embedded in resin or be flash freeze. All these methods have the potential to introduce artifacts during the preparation process, to observe real-time dynamics, ش but more importantly they immobilize the sample making it impossible such as: growth, interactions, and corrosions. In addition to observing dynamic processes, there are many other types of hydrated or liquid materials that can benefit from direct aid imaging in their native hydrated state, such as: paints, oils, cosmetics, nanoparticles, biological specimens, … . In-situ TEM equipped with liquid cell provides the opportunity to examine samples in their native state (in this case: liquid environment) and track occurrence of any dynamic process in real-time. Now researchers are able to perform heating, electrochemical, static, flow, and liquid mixing experiments with a single liquid cell holder and gain a much needed insights into nanomaterial synthesis and manipulation, battery science and biological cells. The efficient fabrication of functional nanomaterial in many cases depends on the in-depth understanding of the early processes during synthesis. This early period of synthesis typically related to the nucleation at early growth stage has a profound influence on the characteristics of final products (e.g.: nanoparticle size distribution, morphology, composition, and crystal structure). In this article, we study various applications of in-situ TEM equipped with liquid cell to provide the readers with better understanding of its functions.