Teneo

The shape and microstructure of the SJP particles were observed with high-resolution SEM micrographs according to the procedure previously reported by our lab [30 ]. Briefly, samples were coated with a 45-mm film of 80% palladium and 20% gold in an aluminum stub with a Leica EM ACE600 coater (Leica Microsystems, Wetzlar, Germany). Then the micrographs of samples were then captured with a field emission scanning electron microscope (FESEM) (Teneo, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Waltham, MA, USA) at 1000×, 5000× and 10,000× magnifications operating at 5 kV with a resolution of 9.8 nm.

For the crystal structure characterization of our powder samples, an X-ray diffractometer (XRD) equipped with a Cu Kα X-ray source (λ = 1.5406 A°) was used (ULTIMA IV Advance XRD System, Rigaku, Tokyo, Japan). The crystallite size was calculated by using Sherrer’s formula (1).
$$L=\frac{K \lambda }{B \mathit{cos}\theta }$$
where (L) is a crystallite size (nm), (K) is a constant linked to crystallite shape (mostly assumed K ≈ 0.9), (λ) is the wavelength of the X-ray (nm), and (B) is the full width at half maximum (FWHM) of the peak (in radians). (θ) can be in radians or degrees because the (cos θ) corresponds to the same number. In addition, a field emission scanning electron microscope (FE-SEM) and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) were used to obtain information about the elemental composition, surface morphology, and thickness. The SEM models used in this work were Teneo (ThermoFisher Scientific, Waltham, MA, USA) and JSM-7500F (JEOL, Tokyo, Japan). The microscopic images were generated by the secondary electrons from the specimen at small and large magnifications.