Electron tomography of complicated mesostructures

Electron tomography (ET) is a rapidly developing technique that is used to acquire the reconstructed complex 3D structures from a tilt series of TEM images. ET was first used in biology to understand cell organelles, subcellular aggregates, and whole cells. Recently, the technique has been increasingly applied in material science to study the morphology and structure of nanomaterials. Herein, we used the state-of-the-art ET technique to obtain tomographic slices with a thickness of less than 1 nm, which eliminate sample thickness effect, so that the structural characteristics “hidden” in the interior of selected mesostructured objects can be captured. To our knowledge, this is the first report of using the ET method to solve a complex structure with both conventional crystal structures and unusual geometrical configurations