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Review
. 2025 May;88(5):1599-1614.
doi: 10.1002/jemt.24799. Epub 2025 Jan 8.

Microscopic Techniques for Nanomaterials Characterization: A Concise Review

Abbas Aziz  1 , Huma Shaikh  1 , Amna Abbas  1 , Kissa E Zehra  1 , Bakhtawar Javed  2
Affiliations
Review

Microscopic Techniques for Nanomaterials Characterization: A Concise Review

Abbas Aziz et al. Microsc Res Tech. 2025 May.

Abstract

Nanomaterials have been gaining interest due to their remarkable properties at the nanoscale. The surface area of particles becomes high at the nanoscale because of this virtue, they have been used in a bundle of applications like electronics, biomedical, agriculture, wastewater treatment, semiconductor industry, cosmetics, drug delivery, paints, and so forth. The morphology (size and shape) of nanomaterials plays an important role because each application requires the appropriate morphology for better performance. Generally, there are a few microscopic techniques used to characterize nanomaterial morphology, AFM (atomic force microscopy), TEM (transmission electron microscopy), SEM (scanning electron microscopy), and others. In this review, the principles, operations, advantages, and limitations of these microscopic techniques for nanomaterial morphology characterization have been briefly discussed. The existing difficulties and path forward for the development of these techniques have also been highlighted.

Keywords: atomic force microscopy; helium ion microscopy; microscopic characterization; morphology‐based applications; nanomaterials; scanning electron microscopy; transmission electron microscopy.

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