A MRSEC innovation comes back home to reveal the atomic structure of new materials
General Overview: In the mid 1990s, an NSF-funded Materials Research Group that evolved into the Wisconsin MRSEC, developed the Local Electrode Atom Probe (LEAP). The instrument plucks and identifies millions of atoms one-by-one from a sample and reconstructs an atomic scale reproduction of the material in a computer. A spin-out company Millenium-Imago Scientific Instruments was formed to commercialize the LEAP instrument. This MRSEC innovation in instrumentation has come full circle with the Wisconsin MRSEC’s recent acquisition of a commercial LEAP. It is being used to analyze the atomic scale structure of a promising new semiconductor material discovered by the MRSEC.
