Towards nanoscale confinement in TEM liquid cells

ORAL

Abstract

Liquid confinement below micrometer thicknesses is of interest to several scientific disciplines and is inherently challenging to study experimentally. More extreme confinement at the single-digit nanometer scale is possible through the use of self-assembled nanostructures such as carbon nanotubes. Bridging the gap between micro- and nanoscale liquid confinement has been achieved with two-piece liquid cells within a transmission electron microscope (TEM), but irreproducibility and difficulties maintaining uniform liquid layer thickness makes high spatial and spectroscopic resolution challenging. We report on improvements made to a monolithic, in-situ TEM liquid cell1 with sub 40nm liquid thickness that overcomes the common challenges encountered with two-piece TEM liquid cells.
1. Tanase, M. et al. High-Resolution Imaging and Spectroscopy at High Pressure: A Novel Liquid Cell for the Transmission Electron Microscope. Microsc. Microanal. 21, 1629–1638 (2015).

*This work is supported as a part of the Center for Enhanced Nanofluidic Transport (CENT), an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences under Award #DE-SC0019112.

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Presenters

  • Kyle Sendgikoski

    • University of Maryland, College Park

Authors

  • Kyle Sendgikoski

    • University of Maryland, College Park

  • Alokik Kanwal

    • Physical Measurement Laboratory, National Institute of Standards and Technology

  • James Alexander Liddle

    • Physical Measurement Laboratory, National Institute of Standards and Technology

  • John Cumings

    • University of Maryland, College Park