History and present status of imaging analysis

In this tutorial review we give a concise and general overview of the development of imaging analytical techniques from its early stages in the late 1950s up to the present. Analytical techniques that are available for the characterization of the atomic and molecular composition as well as the structure at the bulk level often fail for the analysis of heterogeneous materials. Over the last 50 years a number of specialized analytical techniques were developed – or adapted from existing techniques – that, with time, matured into powerful tools for visualizing structural and compositional heterogeneity in nanotechnology and for the study of natural objects. These techniques evolved first at the microscopic and then the mesoscopic level (the range 100–1,000 nm), and later onto the nanoscopic scale between a few nm and 100 nm, where quantum effects start affecting the properties of materials.