Setting-up of a novel approach to in-situ TEM study of structuretransport correlations on single nanostructures

Nanoscience and nanotechnology, top research fields of this century, depend on material and device tailoring, which in turn is strongly related to the properties of materials on atomic scale. Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) is a powerful and versatile tool for studying nanomaterials, widely used in nanotechnology. This is due to a variety of direct techniques, which allow to obtaining information about the structure, chemistry, electronic and magnetic properties of materials at the highest spatial resolution. A step further in the knowledge of nanomaterials and nanodevices is represented by the possibility of studying at atomic resolution their structural properties while an external force-field is applied, such as electric and/or magnetic fields, thermal annealing, stretching, etc.. For example, studying the structural properties of a single nanostructure while it is biased by an external electric field would allow to achieve basic knowledge on the transport properties on atomic scale and to correlate them with the structure and chemistry of the nanostructure. So far, there are no approaches for in-situ microscopy, representing a real scale down of, for example, an I-V measurement on single nanostructure. This is very challenging since the capability to handle single objects with typical sizes of few nanometers is required.