ABSTRACT:
“Wheel, Fire, Microscope.” This statement was made at a nanotechnology-related conference at which the speaker was making a point on the importance of microscopes in our world. What is the connection to nanotechnology? The length scale at which human knowledge and endeavor operates is directly linked to the scale of our microscopies. We have long been able to conjecture about our reality at length scales beyond our ability to observe, but practical developments always require observation. For example, Greek philosophers were able to hypothesize on the existence of atoms but it took 25 centuries before atoms were first observed by humans . Microscope technology is as important to human survival and advancement as the mechanical (wheel) and chemical (fire) technologies that we use.
As we emerge into the century of nanotechnology, we have microscopies that resolve 0.02 nm on a surface (scanning tunneling microscope (STM)) or single atoms in a specimen (field ion microscope (FIM) and transmission electron microscope (TEM)). Surely, that must be good enough. Well, we need even better. The ideal microscope for nanotechnology would reveal the position and identity of all atoms in a specimen for as far as the user wished to see in any material. Is this realistic? To date, this ideal has not been achieved fully but today’s atom probes come very close.

ABOUT TOM KELLY:
A professor of materials science and engineering in the UW-Madison College of Engineering until September 2001, Tom Kelly took a sabbatical and founded a company around the atom probe microscope. This technology enables researchers to view and analyze materials such as computer chips at the atomic scale.

His invention, the Local Electrode Atom Probe, or LEAP® technology, uses a high electrical field to capture an atom-by-atom "picture" of a material and render that image on a computer screen in 3-D.

Thomas F. Kelly received his Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering with highest honors from Northeastern University in June 1977. He then entered graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received a Ph.D. in Materials Science in December 1981. After one year as a postdoctoral associate at M.I.T., he joined the faculty of the Department of Metallurgical and Mineral Engineering of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in January 1983. He was a Full Professor from 1994 until his departure from the renamed Department of Materials Science and Engineering. Tom was also Director of the Materials Science Center from 1992 to 1999.

Tom Kelly, Founder and Chief Technical Officer of Imago Scientific Instruments, has been active in the fields of analytical electron microscopy, atom probe microscopy, rapidly solidified materials, and electronic and superconducting materials for over 25 years. He has published over 120 papers and 6 patents in these fields in that time. Dr. Kelly is an authority on microstructural characterization. He is expert in most forms of transmission electron microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, and atom probe microscopy and has brought innovations to the instrumentation and practice. Tom is currently Vice President of the International Field Emission Society and has recently served a three-year term as Director of the Microscopy Society of America.