Nion Company

Nion is a world-class developer of advanced scanning transmission electron microscopes and other electron-optical instruments. Nion Company was established in 1997 by Ondrej Krivanek and Niklas Dellby in the state of Washington, USA, with the goal of researching, designing, and manufacturing high-end electron-optical instruments and similar products. Nion's founders foresaw, in the early 1990's, that practical aberration correction had become technologically feasible, and that it would bring major benefits to electron microscopy and nanoscience in general. Running against the then-prevailing opinion that aberration correction was impossibly complicated, the were very fortunate in securing a grant from the Paul fund of the Royal Society in the UK (for £80k), with the help of Prof. Nion 100 kV / 300 kV Cs corrector for VG STEMs Nion's first project was designing and building a second-generation spherical aberration corrector for a VG scanning transmission electron microscope. Nion is a world-class developer of advanced scanning transmission electron microscopes (the UltraSTEM™ range) and other electron-optical instruments. They combine a clean, bakeable vacuum, which minimizes contamination problems; advanced electron optics, which provides unprecedented resolution and makes available many operating modes; and complete flexibility that allows the instruments to be configured for new applications even after they have been installed. We design and make state-of-the art aberration correctors, sample stages, detectors, and cold field emission guns.