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

Since the invention of the optical microscopy, scientists knew that in order to achieve higher understanding/ insight into samples Nano-structure they had to increase the magnification. Therefore they strived to make an equipment to further enhance low magnification of the optical microscopy. After much effort, Ernst Ruska developed the first equipment that instead of light used a beam of electrons that was transmitted through the sample and formed an image on the fluorescent screen. This instrument provides users with a vast range of magnifications (from low to very high magnifications) and because it transmit an electron beam through the samples it is called “Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM)”. With the magnification challenge almost resolved (though even now the need for higher magnification still exist), researchers turned their attention to the matter of great importance that is a requirement for imaging and viewing samples in their native state. As every user in the field of transmission electron microscopy knows, in order to put a sample inside TEM, first it should be completely dehydrated to avoid occurrence of any sort of complications with the high vacuum environment that exist inside throughout the device. Nearly all of the samples are either inside a gaseous or liquid environment or they themselves exist in gas or liquid form. In this article we focus on the liquid samples or the samples that are inside a liquid environment. If these kind of samples are dehydrated, scientists and researchers most assuredly lose a lot of valuable information about them and won’t be able to acquire an insight into their in-situ properties that occur in nanoscale. Consequently, one of the priorities of the researchers that are active in this field became developing an instrument that allows in-situ viewing and imaging of the aforementioned samples inside their native state (liquid environment). They successfully developed a device called “In-situ Environmental Transmission Electron Microscopy equipped with liquid cell’. A comprehensive introduction of this device was published as an article in Iranian Journal of Laboratory Knowledge (No. 34 - Summer 2021) and also some of the applications of this device were mentioned in the first part of this article that was published in the previous issue of the Iranian Journal of Laboratory Knowledge (No. 38 - Summer 2022). In this current article, the rest of the applications are presented to you as the second part.