What can electron microscopy tell us beyond crystal structures?
Abstract
Transmission electron microscopy is a powerful tool to directly image crystal structures. Not only that, it is often used to reveal crystal size and morphology, crystal orientation, crystal defects, surface structures, superstructures, etc. However, due to the 2D nature of TEM images, it is easy to make mistakes when we try to recover a 3D structure from them. Scanning electron microscopy is able to provide information on the particle size, morphology and surface topography. However, obtaining information on crystallinity of particles using SEM is difficult. In this microreview article, some practical cases of transmission and scanning electron microscopy investigations of inorganic crystals are reviewed. Commonly occurring uncertainties, imperfection and misunderstandings are discussed.
Citation
Zhou , W & Greer , H F 2016 , ' What can electron microscopy tell us beyond crystal structures? ' , European Journal of Inorganic Chemistry , vol. 2016 , no. 7 , pp. 941–950 . https://doi.org/10.1002/ejic.201501342
Publication
European Journal of Inorganic Chemistry
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1434-1948Type
Journal item
Rights
© 2016 The Authors. Published by Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA. ·This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Description
WZ thanks Professor Jun Yuan for a useful discussion during the revision of this article. The authors wish to thank EPSRC for financial support to the electron microscopy facility (No. EP/F019580/1) and a Platform grant (No. EP/K015540/1). Date of Acceptance: 08/01/2016Collections
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