Imago Scientific Instruments announced today that UC Santa Barbara has placed in service an Imago LEAP 3000X HR Atom Probe Microscope. The high-spatial-resolution, three-dimensional imaging and analyses provided by the atom probe will be utilized by researchers in the Materials, Electrical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, and Geology departments at UCSB Professor James S. Speck, Chair of UCSB's Materials Department, and Director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Wide Band-Gap Semiconductors, commented, "The atom probe instrument will address and solve a wide range of fundamental and applied problems in ongoing and future research at UCSB. It will allow researchers here to perform three-dimensional, atomic-resolution, compositional imaging and analysis. The Imago atom probe will be used to analyze the structure and composition of materials for light emission and electronic devices, materials systems for advanced propulsion, energy generation, including gas turbines and nuclear reactors, and hypersonic flight."

"In the area of electronic materials," continued Speck, "the atom probe instrument will be used to solve key problems in interfacial chemistry and abruptness, alloy composition and homogeneity, and dopant and impurity concentrations in wide bandgap semiconductor structures for light emission and electronic devices, epitaxial materials for spintronics, and materials for novel CMOS devices. In the area of nuclear materials, atom probe will be used extensively to study nanoscale precipitates in nuclear steels. The information provided by atom probe is difficult or impossible to obtain by any other method, and is complementary to the information we obtain using TEM, SEM, AFM, and X-ray diffraction."

UCSB's instrument is the only one of its type operational in North America, and will be made available on a schedule-permitting basis to qualified research organizations outside of UCSB.

Imago President Emmanuel Lakios noted, "Imago continues to grow our installed base and to earn customer satisfaction. We are honored that our product was selected by UCSB for their interdisciplinary research programs. As the universe of applications, ease of use, and cost of ownership of Imago's atom probes has evolved, the user type has also evolved, from that of a dedicated atom probe research group to a multidisciplinary, multi-group model."

Imago Scientific Instruments Corporation is the recognized world leader in the development of atom probe tools and solutions for manufacturers, engineers, scientists and researchers involved in the nano-technology revolution. Imago has a worldwide customer base and delivers support from a number of locations in the United States, Europe, Japan, and Asia Pacific. For more information, see www.imago.com.