NEWSLETTER Summer 2026
Quantifying the Nanoscale: Achieving Reproducibility During In Situ TEM For decades, in situ Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) was primarily valued as a powerful qualitative tool, an imaging technique allowing scientists to visually capture the morphology of nanomaterials. However, as the scientific fields advance and the microscopes have more tools available, simply observing what happens at the atomic scale is no longer sufficient. The rapid advances highlights the critical need for rigorous quantification in in situ and operando techniques. To couple localized nanoscale dynamics with real-world performance, an in situ experiment must successfully quantify three key domains: 1. Precise Stimuli Delivery: Whether delivering thermal energy, gas pressure, electrochemical bias, or photon illumination, researchers must understand the stimuli on the active region of the sample 2. Synchronized Metadata: Without (in situ) metadata synchronization, a structural change cannot be confidently linked to a specific functional property. 3. Mitigation of Artifacts: Quantifying parameters like live electron dose flux and stabilizing the samples are fundamental requirements to separate genuine material behavior from beam-induced artifacts. Ultimately, adding quantification to your in situ TEM techniques transforms your experiment from an observational technique into a reproducible nano-testing laboratory.