Microscope Wins R&D 100 Award

Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc announced that its Thermo Scientific Nicolet iN10 MX FT-IR microscope has been selected as an R&D 100 award winner by an independent judging panel and editors of R&D Magazine. Recognised as one of the year’s 100 most technologically significant products introduced into the marketplace, the Nicolet™ iN™10 MX stood out among the other entries because of its outstanding capability to efficiently address the main challenges associated with infrared microscopy, namely system integration, complexity, accuracy and speed. The novel microscope offers high-speed imaging and increased accuracy while the built-in
sampling and analytical procedures ensure ease-of-use.

Infrared microscopes currently require attachment to an external infrared spectrometer, with the spectrometer’s excitation energy redirected through the microscope. The Nicolet iN10 MX uniquely incorporates all of the
spectrometer’s infrared optics in a single, integrated system, providing much higher optical efficiency for improved sampling, enabling use of a room temperature infrared detector and reducing bench space.

In addition, the Nicolet iN10 MX eliminates the need for specialist training in microscopy or spectroscopy as, for the first time, several assisted sampling and analytical procedures are built into the microscope’s optical operation and software. The pioneering FT-IR microscope enables the analysis of samples as small as three to four microns, allowing for single point analyses as well as mapping or chemical imaging analyses. Conventional infrared microscopes can only analyse samples that are a minimum of ten microns.

The Nicolet iN10 MX surpasses its competitors by facilitating the acquisition of chemical maps at a considerably faster rate. With the standard detector configuration, it is possible to map a 1.2 x 1.2mm area in less than 4.5 minutes, while with an additional imaging detector the system can scan the same area in only 20 seconds. This is more than ten times the speed of conventional image mapping techniques.