Nanomegas SPRL

NanoMEGAS was created in 2004 by a team of scientists and experts in the field of electron crystallography and catalysis. Electron crystallography has been initially developed in Russia from the early 1950 (Vainstein and Zvyagin et al), J.Cowley (Arizona State Univ USA) and later in 1990s by D.Dorset (Buffalo USA), J.Gjonnes (Oslo Norway) among others using TEM microscopy. Inspired by this early work and also contemporal work developed with precession electron diffraction by Vincent and Midgley in Bristol UK(1994), our team developed and was the first to commercialize in 2004 a universal precession device (« spinning star ») for TEM. Being an important part /contribution of this scientific «success strory» (and being proud of it) almost 10 years later precession diffraction / electron crystallography applications are present in almost every major electron microscopy /X-Ray crystallography scientific congress, with more than 180 publications (2004-2013) from various laboratories worldwide and dedicated issues of major scientfic microscopy journals. Our precession diffraction related instrumentation is actually present in more than 180 laboratories all over the world. Our novel digital DigiSTAR precession unit can be adapted to your commercial TEM (100-400 kV old as well as brand new) and combine with 3d diffraction tomography to solve nanocrystals structures, otherwise difficult to solve by conventional X-Ray diffraction techniques. Beam precession into the ASTAR device provides orientation and phase maps at 1-3 nm resolution (FEG-TEM) for a variety of materials (metals, semiconductors, oxides etc..) without any need of particular specimen preparation. Precession diffraction can be also very useful to obtain STRAIN maps at 2-4 nm resolution with FEG-TEM (sensitivity < 2 x 10-4) , providing extremely important information for materials scientists. Precession diffraction is also useful to enhance /optimize EELS / EDS spectra and allow to have better data. NanoMEGAS participates as an SME Partner to the largest EU project (ESTEEM-3) on transmission electron microscopy with mission to supply with expertise on electron diffraction applications. We are active Partners of IUCr (International Union of Crystallography/Electron Crystallography Comission). NanoMEGAS has collaborations with CNRS /INP Grenoble/France, Univ of Mainz /Germany , Univ of Barcelona /Spain , IIT Pisa /Italy , CNR Bari, Univ of Leiden -Netherands to develop new exciting electron crystallography applications.