FEI Marks 100th Titan TEM Milestone with Sale to Stanford University

FEI Company, a leading provider of atomic-scale imaging and analysis systems, today announced that is has received the 100th order for its Titan™, the world’s most powerful commercially-available microscope. Stanford University has ordered the Titan 80-300 environmental transmission electron microscope (ETEM) for a new facility associated with its Nanocharacterization Laboratory. The Titan ETEM is the premier solution for chemical and catalyst research at the atomic scale, and provides unique capabilities for studying dynamic processes of materials under gas and elevated temperature conditions. The multi-million dollar system will ship to Stanford University in the first half of 2010.

Professor Robert Sinclair of Stanford University stated, “We are very excited at the prospect of carrying out pioneering work using the Titan ETEM, especially in the synthesis and understanding of new materials for energy and the environment, and to study the responses of different materials as a function of temperature and gas type down to the atomic level. The Titan ETEM will be the cornerstone of a new facility that is associated with Stanford’s Nanocharacterization Laboratory.”

The Titan ETEM at Stanford will also be equipped with a spherical aberration image corrector and a monochromator, permitting direct viewing and analysis of interactions between the sample and its environment at the atomic scale.

“The sale of the 100th Titan is an important milestone, highlighting FEI’s leading position in electron microscopy. We plan to continue to expand on the platform’s fundamental leadership characteristics, enabling a range of new pioneering applications, such as the ETEM capability on the Stanford Titan system,” said Dominique Hubert, FEI’s vice president and general manager, Research Division. “For example, the Titan ETEM’s ability to observe the sample in a controlled gaseous state is of great importance in applications with the aim of studying interactions between various materials and their environment: seeing chemistry at work. This includes processes such as corrosion, oxidation and, above all, catalysis for new materials and energy. This capability of the Titan ETEM is an example of how the platform’s flexibility and modularity helps to enable the study of a wide variety of phenomenon across multiple disciplines.”