In Situ TEM Method and Materials

Abstract

In 1959, Nobel laureate Richard Feynman gave a speech entitled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”. In his speech, he talked about the manipulation and control of materials on a small length scale, such as the fabrication of molecular machines. In 1982, Binnig et al. invented scanning tunneling microscope (STM) [1]. In 1990, Eigler et al. demonstrated the ability of arranging atoms and put 35 Xe atoms on the surface of Ni crystal patterned as “IBM” [2]. However, STM is based on the tunneling current and requires a conductive surface. Binning et al. invented atomic force microscopy (AFM) [3], which is based on the interacting forces between the scanning probe and sample surface. Recently, the resolution and manipulation precision of AFMs has reached atomic level [4]. What scanning probe microscopy (SPM) has in common is that the observations and manipulations are limited to the surface, lacking insights into the structural mechanisms. In addition, scanning is involved for both imaging and manipulation, which limits the efficiency. As already been introduced in Chap. 1, TEM is a powerful tool for the materials structural characterizations with atomic resolution. In recent years, it is possible to combine SPM with TEM to conduct high-resolution structural characterizations in three dimensions and precise manipulations of nanomaterials simultaneously [5].