A Suspended Floor for High-Performance Electron Microscopy and Nanoscience

The recent article in this journal by O'Keefe et al provides an excellent introduction to the complexities that must be considered when embarking on the installation of a high-resolution electron microscope. It should not pass one's notice, however, that the advent of nanoscience has placed ever stricter attention on the control of vibration not just for analytical instrumentation but also for fabrication facilities. In addition to the thick isolated concrete slab-ongratie described in the above article, designs are coming into use (Fig. 1) that incorporate rigid “waffle” floor structures on closely spaced building columns and pneumatically isolated inertia slabs as are used, for example, in the subterranean portion of the NIST Advanced Metrology Laboratory. Each of these approaches might with time also find applications in the design of electron microscopy laboratories. However, each has the problem of rather high expense of construction.