Liquid-cell transmission electron microscopy (LCTEM) is an emerging technique to realize in-situ investigations in liquids with high spatiotemporal resolution. While conventional TEM is primarily used to characterize solids, LCTEM enables the direct observation of dynamic changes in samples under more biologically relevant environmental conditions.
In our project, LCTEM is used to analyze the dynamic behavior of nanoparticles (NPs) and a selection of biological structures (e.g. proteins, viruses and bacteria), suspended in a liquid environment confined within the microchannels of a liquid-cell TEM chip or within liquid pockets of Graphene liquid-cell chips. Multiple parameters can be altered mid-observation to induce changes in the system, e.g. external liquid flow, incident electron dose rate or optical excitation.
With this approach we can observe dynamic processes such as particle motion, ordering phenomena, aggregation, chemical reactions and structural changes on the nanoscale.
