Time‐Efficient Electron Tomography for a Quantitative Description of Chiral Nanorods

Abstract Electron tomography (ET) is an outstanding technique to access information about nanoparticles whose properties are critically dependent on their 3D shape and structure. A particularly relevant application of ET concerns plasmonic chiral nanoparticles, which exhibit strong correlation between optical activity and asymmetric morphology. Thus, it is crucial to go beyond qualitative visual inspection of ET reconstructions and extract quantitative shape or chirality descriptors. However, the time‐consuming nature of conventional ET, where a series of 2D projection images is used for one 3D reconstruction, makes it challenging to collect statistically representative data. A recently proposed semi‐automated approach for the acquisition of the required tilt series can reduce the data collection time from typically ≈ 45 minutes–1 hour to less than 10 minutes. What remains unclear is how this method influences the quality of the reconstruction and the accuracy of the samples’ quantitative descriptors. Here, two sets of chiral gold nanoparticles with wrinkled or twisted morphological chirality are used. It is demonstrated that the fast tilt series acquisitions yield results that are consistent with conventional ET, provided a standardized data processing protocol is used. Finally, a practical example of how fast ET can be used to obtain more statistically relevant measurements is presented.