Knowledge Base

The aerospace and defense (A&D) industry is constantly evolving - new requirements and specifications to counter the next set of adversarial threats drive the need for advanced solutions and architectures. Defense electronics and the industry that serves this market always needs to be one step ahead, providing high precision instrumentation, subsystems and components for Radar, Electronic Warfare, Satellite and Communications...

Kenneth Bart, Director of the Microscopy & Imaging Facility at Hamilton College, Clinton, NY, was testing a sample preparation protocol when a magnitude 5.0 earthquake struck. At that moment he was using an environmental scanning electron microscope (ESEM) isolated on a TMC Floor Platform with Gimbal Piston™ air isolators to collect an image of a hydrated specimen of a firefly...

Did you know that you can now use Zygo Optical Profilers within argon chambers? This groundbreaking capability allows for precise metrology in controlled argon environments, commonly referred to as Argon Gloveboxes. This unique and thoroughly tested feature enables optical profiling under argon conditions, opening new possibilities for research and manufacturing applications. Argon chambers are indispensable tools in various research and...

Coherence scanning interferometry for biofilms produces images with larger field of view and lowermeasurement noise in real-time. The team at a leading university research lab studies bacterial biofilms for insights into their behavior and growth processes. Accurate biofilm measurement is essential for the lab’s work. However, the complexity and variability of biofilms pose unique challenges for conventional imaging tools.The team...

Current variable image magnification methods present problematic issues for high precision metrology instruments. This paper describes a novel approach to providing variable system magnification while avoiding those shortcomings. An optical zoom generally has multiple lens groups moving in concert to simultaneously adjust the effective focal length and maintain focus. Inevitably, the motion of the elements results in image drift and...

Since the earliest developments 150 years ago, advances in light sources, optics, and data processing have firmly established interferometry as an indispensable tool for measurement of distance, displacement, and angle . While it can be sensibly argued that ever-increasing demands on precision have driven advances in interferometric positioning, here we follow the path to the current state of the art...

Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) is essential for studying the microscopic morphology of minerals and fossils, as well as detecting microscopic structural features. SEM provides high-resolution imaging of mineral textures and crystal structures while enabling qualitative and semi-quantitative micro-area compositional analysis. Figure 1 - BSE Image of Crystalline Rock, Eucentrically Tilted at 10° Figure 1 presents a backscattered electron (BSE) image...

Sample preparation techniques for large-area data acquisition Large-area transmission Kikuchi diffraction (TKD) analysis of nanostructured nickel. Inverse pole figure (IPF) color-coded orientation maps with 8 nm twin boundaries are shown. Data was collected from defect-free, ultrathin ~40 nm samples with a maximum of three grain layers. TKD analyses condition: 30 kV acceleration voltage and 1.6 nA beam current. To achieve optimal...

Surface roughness refers to the fine texture of a part’s surface. Every manufactured part’s surface has three key components—form, waviness, and roughness. Together, they influence how well a part performs. The characteristics of these components are tied to the manufacturing process or processes used to create the part. This could be polishing, grinding, cutting, or edging to name a few.Surface...

Moving stages are essential but challenging components in semiconductor and nanotechnology manufacturing. These stages, used in wafer inspection, lithography, metrology ,and other applications can cause significant vibration that can affect tool performance and throughput if it is not mitigated properly.In this interview, Elias Brassitos, Senior Control Systems Engineer at AMETEK, talks to AZoMaterials about these challenges and solutions. TMC works...