Transmission electron micrograph can visualize the particle up to nano scale. If there is particle size lesser than that, how can we identify it? I think one way is to increase the power of transmission electron microscope. Does anyone know any other methods?
Well as far as I know TEM can measure particles of size till 0.1nm and if particles are smaller than that then it would be difficult to do microscopy. DLS may help in this regard but I am not really sure about it.
we can do smaller Nano particles size 1 to 100nm by using Small Angle X-ray Scattering
Probably, Scanning Tunneling Microscopy, if the cluster mobility on the surface is not high.
The atomic sizes are in the angstrom (~1X10E-1 nm) scale
The nanopartciles are in the 1-100 nm scale
in between there are particles you are asking about. Normally in the form of small clusters of atoms or so.
In many cases where nanoparticles intend to agglomerate, it will be very challenging to determine the size by looking for grain boundaries within agglomerations. No matter how straightforward and powerful TEM is, I find it sometimes not reliable.
I will personally seek more information from pair distribution function and/or small-angle scattering to validate the TEM result. These two techniques are not invasive (some materials are beam sensitive to use TEM, and transferring samples to vacuum chamber might cause air contamination), but are less convenient than TEM since both of them are synchrotron based techniques.
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