Advanced microscope installed for materials analysis

Staff -- Control Engineering, 12/1/2005

Hillsboro, OR—Ohio State University's Center for Accelerated Maturation of Materials (CAMM) has begun using the FEI Titan 80-300 microscope, reported to be the world's highest-resolution, commercially available, scanning/transmission electron microscope (S/TEM). The system, the first to be installed at a North American site, yields sub-angstrom (atomic scale) imaging and analysis capabilities.

Sub-angstrom imaging will give researchers at CAMM a greater ability to make discoveries on structure-property relationships of a wide spectrum of materials. Close coupling of computational methods with more-detailed experimental validation at the atomic level are expected to make new materials development cycles shorter and less costly.

"CAMM embarked upon a joint project with FEI Co. to develop an advanced S/TEM platform aimed at providing researchers with an accurate physical picture of the materials they are modeling," says Dr. Hamish Fraser, director of CAMM. "We are enthusiastic to see that it has resulted in such a powerful tool that will play an indispensable role in our effort to develop new methods for sophisticated characterization and computation models to accelerate new materials development cycles."

Titan's dedicated platform for corrector and monochromator technologies is highly automated and provides leading-edge stability, performance, and flexibility, according to CAMM researchers. The microscope enables deep sub-angstrom resolution; and its upgradeable design is said to enable larger nanotechnology and national research centers to afford dedicated aberration corrected TEM technology. Titan S/TEM was introduced in August 2005.

For more from Control Engineering on the microscope visit: www.controleng.com/article/CA6283633 or www.feicompany.com or www.osu.edu/CAMM.