tools for tomorrow™
tools for tomorrow™As part of their 'Innovators' series, the National Science Foundation (NSF) produced a video, 'Eyes of Science', about the benefits of being able to see and analyze things on the atomic scale. The video featured Nion's President, Dr Ondrej Krivanek, and one of our long-term collaborators, Dr Philip Batson. The video can be seen here.
After spending several weeks in transit and at French customs, the Orsay UltraSTEM200™ was successfully installed in record time: 3 weeks from opening up the crates to acceptance by the Orsay group. It reached and exceeded the specified performance at 60, 100 and 200 keV operating energies, including 0.6 Å information transfer at 200 keV and 1.2 Å information transfer at 60 keV.
Christian Colliex, a well-known EELS expert and ex-president of IFSM, who originated the Orsay UltraSTEM project, wrote to Nion:
"[UltraSTEM200] est incontestablement une machine fort impressionnante et ce matin encore en regardant des images en fond noir s'enregistrer sur des iles d'or, la résolution et la stabilité étaient exceptionnels."...or in English...
"[UltraSTEM200] is undoubtedly a very impressive machine and again this morning looking at [HAADF images] of gold islands, resolution and stability were exceptional."
Thanks to all of our users for helping us to improve our microscopes with continued feedback and suggestions during the year. We are pleased to announce that Dr Earl Kirkland, Sr. Research Associate at Cornell University, has won the 2010 Nion User feedback contest.
He is shown on the left with his brand new iPad in front of the UltraSTEM 100 at the lab.
Nion has shipped the first one of its new 200 kV UltraSTEMs, to CNRS Orsay. In the final tests, the microscope recorded 0.6 Å spacings in HAADF at 200 kV and demonstrated unprecedented levels of stability and CFEG brightness (4x1013 A / (m2 sr) at 200 keV). The picture shows several of the 16 crates that contained the microscope and its accessories, ready for loading up for the ride to the airport.
Nion’s George Corbin demonstrated once more his considerable talent for driving a forklift. See the video below for a demo of his precision work.
This year's Labor Day edition of Seattle's main newspaper, the Seattle Times, featured an article about Nion under the headline "Kirkland microscopes can examine matter one atom at a time". (Kirkland, where Nion is located, is a suburb of Seattle.) The article started on page 1 and continued on page 6. It was written by Sandi Doughton, Seattle Times Science Correspondent, who did a great job describing what Nion does in lively terms aimed at a general audience.
Several interesting events resulted from the article. For instance, a teacher from a local high school called up and arranged a tour of Nion for the school’s science club. Nion was very glad to be able to do its part in making cutting-edge science accessible to everyone.
Following the M&M meeting, on Friday August 6, Nion held an open house at its Kirkland, WA facility. Visitors were able to see Nion’s new 200 kV UltraSTEM in operation. Following a visitor request, the microscope was retuned for 40 kV imaging, which it had not done up to that point, and it was producing clear 40 kV images of single atoms of lead about an hour later. Several distinguished experts visited during the day, including Prof. Phil Batson of Rutgers, Dr. Max Haider of CEOS GmbH (see picture), Drs. Peter Nellist and Valeria Nicolosi of Oxford University, and Prof. Mervyn Shannon of the UK SuperSTEM Facility.
The day finished very pleasantly with a dinner for all in a local seafood restaurant. Several visitors then joined the Nion crew for an R&R weekend at a famous Cascade mountains resort – the Sleeping Lady.
Nion demonstrated its UltraSTEM100™ and UltraSTEM200™ scanning transmission electron microscopes at the 2010 M&M meeting, remotely via a fast Internet connection.
Three microscopes were demonstrated in turn: the UltraSTEM200™ presently at Nion, and the UltraSTEM100™s at ORNL and Cornell. At 4 pm on each day of the conference, there was a session in which high quality experimental data was acquired live from the exhibition floor by different experts:
The sessions were a remarkable collaborative effort and were well attended, as shown in the pictures above.
Following his election to Britain’s Royal Society this May, Nion’s President Ondrej Krivanek was officially admitted into the Society. At the admission ceremonies, which took place over three days at the Royal Society headquarters in London, new Fellows and Members gave seminars on their work, and signed the membership book that contains, among others, Newton’s, Darwin’s, J.J. Thomson’s and Rutherford’s signatures.
The summary of Ondrej’s scientific contributions on the Royal Society web page states:
Ondrej Krivanek is at the forefront of pioneering advances that have endowed electron microscopy with the ability to image and analyze matter atom-by-atom.
An article about Ondrej's contributions has been put on the web by ASU, where he is an adjunct professor of physics.
Nion research reported by Physics Today. The June issue of the flagship magazine of the American Physical Society, Physics Today, features an article by Barbara Goss-Levi on aberration-corrected STEM and the recent atom-by-atom imaging and analysis performed with a Nion electron microscope. See the full article here.
A paper in the issue of Nature published on 2010.03.25 describes a significant first: resolving and identifying all the atoms in an area of monolayer boron nitride that contained carbon and oxygen atomic substitutions.
Nature recognized the significance of the work by giving it the prized cover spot. The research was performed at ORNL using the UltraSTEM100 delivered in March 2009. The image shown here is the paper's Figure 3, in which a theoretical structure+composition model worked out from an experimental image and refined by Density-Functional Theory (DFT) calculations has been superposed on the experimental image. Carbon atoms are shown in yellow, boron in red, nitrogen in green and oxygen in blue.