Alio Industries has recently released a high-precision focusing stage – the AI-VC-600-Z-SCB. Such stages are critical in such applications as super resolution microscopy, atomic force microscopy, digital pathology, surface metrology and industrial manufacturing and inspection applications. For such applications, a must is nanometre-level resolution and extremely fast millisecond-range response
Bill Hennessey, President of Alio Industries says, “While microscopes have long been invaluable tools in biological research, a key drawback has been resolution limitations, making it impossible to use them as a tool to examine sub-cellular or sub-organelle details. Recent advances in fluorescence microscopy, a type of light microscopy in which one wavelength of light is absorbed and another omitted, allows super-resolution microscopy to observe living sub-cellular structures and activities.”
The AI-VC-600-Z-SCB high-precision focusing stage, when used in such applications, provides closed-loop precision and extremely fast response to achieve sub-atomic resolution, critical in high-resolution microscopy. The result is higher quality images at a much faster rate of speed. With a 6mm travel range and a 500g payload, the AI-VC-600-Z-SCB can achieve 4G 100% S-curve peak acceleration (which is equivalent to 2G trapezoidal acceleration) and 300mm/sec with 5nm resolution and can achieve 1nm resolution by reducing the speed capability to 30mm/sec.
Hennessey continues, “The new stage facilitates many applications at the bleeding edge of life science research, including DNA sequencing to stimulate the drive towards personalized medicine. Our high-precision microscope focusing stages are also a game changer in the field of digital pathology. The key to success in these types of applications is image capture at a high rate of speed with absolute focus on nanometre-level precision. The applications further require that the motion control solution must combine smoothness (meaning highest possible image resolution), flatness (controlling the z-axis meaning maintenance of focus), and straightness (reducing overlap between scanning “passes” and increasing throughput).
