Recent Trend of Transmission Electron Microscopy and Application to Green Nano-technology

Abstract

Transmission electron microscopy has been playing an important role in research and development of nanotechnology which is common and fundamental in various fields of science and technology such as energy, environmental sciences, information and telecommunications, and life sciences and etc. A transmission electron microscope (TEM) provides us with crystallographic information and positional information from a local area of specimen. Furthermore information on local chemical composition and atomic bonding state is obtained provided the TEM is equipped with an X-ray energy dispersive spectrometer (XEDS) and an electron energy loss spectrometer (EELS). The image resolution and special resolution of elemental analysis have been improved to an atomic level together with the development of an analytical TEM that has a field emission gun, an aberration corrector and a function of scanning TEM (STEM). It has been possible to extract high quality and various information on substance and materials, owing to the development of electron detectors and imaging techniques of STEM. Objects of TEM observation have been widely spread after the development of related techniques such as preparation of TEM samples and controlling of specimen environment (heating, cooling, gas pressure, stress application etc.). We introduce recent trend of transmission electron microscopy and demonstrate some applications to green nanotechnology which is closely related to development of renewable energy, energy saving, energy storing, saving of rear resource, removal of harmful substance from air and water and so on.

Keywords

• transmission electron microscope
• scanning transmission electron microscope
• analytical electron microscope
• characterization of nano-structure
• nano-technology
• green technology