Abstract

The desire to fabricate nanostructures with controlled properties has generated considerable interest in many fields such as molecular nanotechnology, electronic devices and/or heterogeneous catalysis. In particular, morphological control of nanoparticles has become increasingly important as many of their physical and chemical properties are highly shape-dependent and require an accurate characterization technique. As nanomaterials are often three-dimensional (3D) in nature, the limited-size, complexity and heterogeneity of the produced nanostructures require an accurate three-dimensional characterization technique. As such a three-dimensional technique, electron tomography has been used successfully in materials science and its application has developed rapidly over recent years enabling 3D analysis allowing a better understanding of physical-chemical properties of nanostructures. A variety of electron tomography results of a wide range of different novel nanostructures, arising from several fields of nanotechnologies, will be shown together with some recent development to enhance the tomographic characterization.