Helium Ion Microscope

This week, we hosted a visit from Zeiss. They gave a presentation on a new technology that they just acquired called a Helium Ion Microscope. I remember seeing this demonstrated two years ago at the Microscopy & Microanalysis Convention in Chicago. Allis, which was purchased by Zeiss two years ago was the company that successfully figured out how to make it work.

This is a devise similar to a Scanning Electron Microscope, but uses Helium ions to create secondary electrons off the sample instead of an electron beam. This has advantages of getting much better resolution (due to it's incredibly small virtual source of three atoms), and an amazing depth of field compared to standard SEM. I think that this tool has the potential to replace the Scanning Electron Microscope, but they're about twice as expensive as a high-end SEM right now. There are only 7 being used in the world right now (soon to be 8). One is at Harvard and there is another in Singapore (where the speaker is teaching right now).
In all, the event was a success. Thirty plus people showed up from all over the New York area including people from Rockefeller University, the New York Structural Biology Center, and the New York University School of Medicine.