 | |
| Company type | Subsidiary |
|---|---|
| Industry | Scientific and Technical Instruments |
| Founded | 1997 |
| Founders | Ondrej Krivanek, Niklas Dellby |
| Headquarters | Kirkland, Washington |
| Parent | Bruker |
| Website | nion |
| Footnotes /references [1] | |
Nion is a manufacturer of scanning transmission electron microscopes (STEMs) based in Kirkland, Washington State, USA.
Nion Co. was founded in 1997 in Washington State, USA, by Ondrej Krivanek [2] and Niklas Dellby, with a mission to design and build advanced instruments for electron microscopy. Prior to founding Nion, Krivanek and Dellby built a working proof-of principle aberration corrector for a STEM, in Cambridge UK. Following this success, Philip Batson of IBM TJ Watson Research Center asked them to build an aberration corrector for his STEM. Krivanek was a research professor at University of Washington at the time, and he and Dellby decided to start Nion Co. and build a redesigned corrector. The new corrector was delivered to IBM in June 2020, and demonstrated direct sub-Å resolution. Nion went on to supply the scientific community with correctors for 100 and 300 kV dedicated STEMs made by Vacuum Generators. Nion's 2004 Science article [3] demonstrated 0.78 Å resolution and led to wide acceptance of aberration correction as the best way to achieve high spatial resolution in electron microscopy.
It soon became clear that a new, higher stability electron microscope was needed, built from the ground up so that resolutions of 0.5 Ångstroms and bellow could be reached. [4] Nion developed such an instrument as its next project: a 100 kV aberration corrected, high-stability electron microscope called UltraSTEM, [5] with resolution capability well below one Angstrom. [6] [7] The first deliveries of this instrument took place in 2008, to Cornell University and the SuperSTEM Daresbury Laboratory. [8] A 200 kV version of this microscope was delivered to the Orsay STEM laboratory near Paris in 2010, and was able to rech 0.5 Å resolution.
Nion went on to develop a monochromated STEM, with the first delivery to Arizona State University in 2013. Subsequent deliveries went to Rutgers University, Daresbury SuperSTEM, [9] and many other laboratories in the USA, Canada, Europe and China. In 2014, the ASU and Rutgers monochromatic STEMs showed that phonons could be detected with high spatial resolution in an electron microscope by ultra-high energy resolution electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS). [10] In 2018, Nion introduced a new EELS spectrometer, which improved the EELS resolution to 3 meV, and allowed the vibrations of single atoms to be studied. [11]
Other innovations introduced by Nion include X-ray spectroscopy with single-atom sensitivity, [12] imaging samples in a contamination-free ultra-high vacuum (UHV) environment, atomic resolution secondary electron imaging (SEI) of surfaces of samples held in UHV, and stable imaging at temperatures <10 K.
In 2020, co-founder of Nion, Ondrej Krivanek, shared the Kavli Prize for Nanoscience for work creating the first aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscope with resolution below one ångstrom (0.1 nanometers). [13] [14] [6]
In January 2024, Nion was acquired by Bruker, which moved Bruker into the manufacture of electron microscopes. [15]
An electron microscope is a microscope that uses a beam of electrons as a source of illumination. They use electron optics that are analogous to the glass lenses of an optical light microscope to control the electron beam, for instance focusing them to produce magnified images or electron diffraction patterns. As the wavelength of an electron can be up to 100,000 times smaller than that of visible light, electron microscopes have a much higher resolution of about 0.1 nm, which compares to about 200 nm for light microscopes. Electron microscope may refer to:
Infrared spectroscopy is the measurement of the interaction of infrared radiation with matter by absorption, emission, or reflection. It is used to study and identify chemical substances or functional groups in solid, liquid, or gaseous forms. It can be used to characterize new materials or identify and verify known and unknown samples. The method or technique of infrared spectroscopy is conducted with an instrument called an infrared spectrometer which produces an infrared spectrum. An IR spectrum can be visualized in a graph of infrared light absorbance on the vertical axis vs. frequency, wavenumber or wavelength on the horizontal axis. Typical units of wavenumber used in IR spectra are reciprocal centimeters, with the symbol cm−1. Units of IR wavelength are commonly given in micrometers, symbol μm, which are related to the wavenumber in a reciprocal way. A common laboratory instrument that uses this technique is a Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometer. Two-dimensional IR is also possible as discussed below.
Electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS) is a form of electron microscopy in which a material is exposed to a beam of electrons with a known, narrow range of kinetic energies. Some of the electrons will undergo inelastic scattering, which means that they lose energy and have their paths slightly and randomly deflected. The amount of energy loss can be measured via an electron spectrometer and interpreted in terms of what caused the energy loss. Inelastic interactions include phonon excitations, inter- and intra-band transitions, plasmon excitations, inner shell ionizations, and Cherenkov radiation. The inner-shell ionizations are particularly useful for detecting the elemental components of a material. For example, one might find that a larger-than-expected number of electrons comes through the material with 285 eV less energy than they had when they entered the material. This is approximately the amount of energy needed to remove an inner-shell electron from a carbon atom, which can be taken as evidence that there is a significant amount of carbon present in the sample. With some care, and looking at a wide range of energy losses, one can determine the types of atoms, and the numbers of atoms of each type, being struck by the beam. The scattering angle can also be measured, giving information about the dispersion relation of whatever material excitation caused the inelastic scattering.
Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) is a microscopy technique in which a beam of electrons is transmitted through a specimen to form an image. The specimen is most often an ultrathin section less than 100 nm thick or a suspension on a grid. An image is formed from the interaction of the electrons with the sample as the beam is transmitted through the specimen. The image is then magnified and focused onto an imaging device, such as a fluorescent screen, a layer of photographic film, or a detector such as a scintillator attached to a charge-coupled device or a direct electron detector.
Photoemission electron microscopy is a type of electron microscopy that utilizes local variations in electron emission to generate image contrast. The excitation is usually produced by ultraviolet light, synchrotron radiation or X-ray sources. PEEM measures the coefficient indirectly by collecting the emitted secondary electrons generated in the electron cascade that follows the creation of the primary core hole in the absorption process. PEEM is a surface sensitive technique because the emitted electrons originate from a shallow layer. In physics, this technique is referred to as PEEM, which goes together naturally with low-energy electron diffraction (LEED), and low-energy electron microscopy (LEEM). In biology, it is called photoelectron microscopy (PEM), which fits with photoelectron spectroscopy (PES), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and scanning electron microscopy (SEM).
The Transmission Electron Aberration-Corrected Microscope (TEAM) Project is a collaborative research project between four US laboratories and two companies. The project's main activity is design and application of a transmission electron microscope (TEM) with a spatial resolution below 0.05 nanometers, which is roughly half the size of an atom of hydrogen.
A scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) is a type of transmission electron microscope (TEM). Pronunciation is [stɛm] or [ɛsti:i:ɛm]. As with a conventional transmission electron microscope (CTEM), images are formed by electrons passing through a sufficiently thin specimen. However, unlike CTEM, in STEM the electron beam is focused to a fine spot which is then scanned over the sample in a raster illumination system constructed so that the sample is illuminated at each point with the beam parallel to the optical axis. The rastering of the beam across the sample makes STEM suitable for analytical techniques such as Z-contrast annular dark-field imaging, and spectroscopic mapping by energy dispersive X-ray (EDX) spectroscopy, or electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS). These signals can be obtained simultaneously, allowing direct correlation of images and spectroscopic data.
High resolution electron energy loss spectroscopy (HREELS) is a tool used in surface science. The inelastic scattering of electrons from surfaces is utilized to study electronic excitations or vibrational modes of the surface of a material or of molecules adsorbed to a surface. In contrast to other electron energy loss spectroscopies (EELS), HREELS deals with small energy losses in the range of 10−3 eV to 1 eV. It plays an important role in the investigation of surface structure, catalysis, dispersion of surface phonons and the monitoring of epitaxial growth.
Michael A. O'Keefe is a physicist who has worked in materials science and electron microscopy. He is perhaps best known for his production of the seminal computer code for modeling of high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) images; his software was later made available as part of the DeepView package for remote electron microscopy and control. O'Keefe's tutorial on theory and application of high-resolution electron microscope image simulation is available online.
Annular dark-field imaging is a method of mapping samples in a scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM). These images are formed by collecting scattered electrons with an annular dark-field detector.
High-resolution transmission electron microscopy is an imaging mode of specialized transmission electron microscopes that allows for direct imaging of the atomic structure of samples. It is a powerful tool to study properties of materials on the atomic scale, such as semiconductors, metals, nanoparticles and sp2-bonded carbon. While this term is often also used to refer to high resolution scanning transmission electron microscopy, mostly in high angle annular dark field mode, this article describes mainly the imaging of an object by recording the two-dimensional spatial wave amplitude distribution in the image plane, similar to a "classic" light microscope. For disambiguation, the technique is also often referred to as phase contrast transmission electron microscopy, although this term is less appropriate. At present, the highest point resolution realised in high resolution transmission electron microscopy is around 0.5 ångströms (0.050 nm). At these small scales, individual atoms of a crystal and defects can be resolved. For 3-dimensional crystals, it is necessary to combine several views, taken from different angles, into a 3D map. This technique is called electron tomography.
JEOL, Ltd. is a major developer and manufacturer of electron microscopes and other scientific instruments, industrial equipment and medical equipment.
The Ernst Ruska-Centre for Microscopy and Spectroscopy with Electrons (ER-C) is an institute located on the campus of Forschungszentrum Jülich belonging to the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres. It comprises three divisions: ER-C-1 “Physics of Nanoscale systems”, ER-C-2 “Materials Science and Technology” and ER-C-3 “Structural Biology”.
Knut W. Urban is a German physicist. He has been the Director of the Institute of Microstructure Research at Forschungszentrum Jülich from 1987 to 2010.
Transmission electron microscopy DNA sequencing is a single-molecule sequencing technology that uses transmission electron microscopy techniques. The method was conceived and developed in the 1960s and 70s, but lost favor when the extent of damage to the sample was recognized.
Ondrej L. Krivanek is a Czech/British physicist resident in the United States, and a leading developer of electron-optical instrumentation. He won the Kavli Prize for Nanoscience in 2020 for his substantial innovations in atomic resolution electron microscopy.
Maximilian Haider is an Austrian physicist.
Peter David Nellist, is a British physicist and materials scientist, currently a professor in the Department of Materials at the University of Oxford. He is noted for pioneering new techniques in high-resolution electron microscopy.
Aberration-Corrected Transmission Electron Microscopy (AC-TEM) is the general term for using electron microscopes where electro optical components are introduced to reduce the aberrations that would otherwise reduce the resolution of images. Historically electron microscopes had quite severe aberrations, and until about the start of the 21st century the resolution was quite limited, at best able to image the atomic structure of materials so long as the atoms were far enough apart. Theoretical methods of correcting the aberrations existed for some time, but could not be implemented in practice. Around the turn of the century the electron optical components were coupled with computer control of the lenses and their alignment; this was the breakthrough which led to significant improvements both in resolution and the clarity of the images. As of 2024 correction of geometric aberrations is standard in many commercial electron microscopes. They are extensively used in many different areas of science.
K. Andre Mkhoyan is the Ray D. and Mary T. Johnson Chair and Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of Minnesota. He is recognized for advancing both fundamental scientific understanding and diverse applications of scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) techniques. He was elected as a Fellow of the Microscopy Society of America in 2024 for "seminal contributions to the understanding of electron beam channeling, quantification of imaging and spectroscopy in STEM, and for his discovery of fundamentally new behavior in crystal point and line defects using STEM." According to Web of Science, he has produced over 180 published works that have been cited over 9800 times, with an h-index of 44 as of October 25, 2024.
| Basics | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Electron interaction with matter | |||||||
| Instrumentation | |||||||
| Microscopes |
| ||||||
| Techniques |
| ||||||
| Others |
| ||||||
