Technical Milestones of Nanotechnology

After the cooperation with AEG in the early 1940ies, Carl Zeiss began joining the further development of the EM-series: in 1949 Carl Zeiss rolled out the EM 8, a microscope compensating optical errors better and thereby providing an excellent image quality. Its successor, the EM 9, initiated a new era in the production of electron microscopes in 1956: it was the worlds first electromagnetic TEM with automatic electronic exposure control. With the launch of the EM 902 in 1984, Carl Zeiss also introduced Castaing-Henry filter for commercial electron microscopes. This technique enables users to obtain high-resolution element mapping images. GEMINI technology, which was first incorporated in the DSM 982 GEMINI, is known for its combined electrostatic-magnetic lens.

In 2007, Carl Zeiss introduced two groundbreaking innovations: the ORION microscope, which generates images by scanning the sample with helium ions instead of electrons and provides much higher resolution and contrast, and CRISP, the only TEM in the world with the ability to image at the atomic level. In 2010, Carl Zeiss once more demonstrated its expertise in the field of electron microscopes with its Shuttle & Find system for correlative microscopy. In 2011 the electron microscopy division with its manufacturing sites in Oberkochen, Peabody and Cambridge was successfully merged. The company was renamed in Carl Zeiss Microscopy GmbH, which is still headquartered in Jena where it all began.