Nion (company)

Nion is a manufacturer of scanning transmission electron microscopes (STEMs) based in Kirkland, Washington.

History
In 1997, Ondrej Krivanek and Niklas Dellby were approached by Philip Batson from IBM TJ Watson Research Center to build a STEM aberration corrector. Krivanek was a research professor at University of Washington at the time, and decided to approach the project with a new company. Krivanek and Dellby used a $120,000 grant from the Royal Society to build their first aberration corrector. Soon, Nion had constructed correctors for both spherical aberration and chromatic aberration which could be retrofitted into existing STEMs. The publicity gained from this achievement led to the scientific community calling for a microscope built from the ground up with aberration correction in mind, which could have potential at reaching resolutions below 0.5 Angstroms.

After developing aberration correctors as modifications for microscopes, Nion developed their first microscope, called UltraSTEM 1, a new aberration corrected microscope with resolution capability below one Angstrom.

In 2008, Nion unveiled the SuperSTEM 2, which provided 20 million times magnification. The SuperSTEM 2 was developed in collaboration with University of Liverpool, University of Glasgow, University of Leeds, and Daresbury Laboratory.

In 2015, Nion delivered a Hermes Scanning Transmission Electron Microscope priced at £3.7 million to EPSRC in the UK.

Awards
In 2020, co-founder of Nion, Ondrej Krivanek, shared the Kavli Prize for Nanoscience for work creating the first aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscope with resolution below one ångstrom (0.1 nanometers).

Acquisition
In January 2024, Nion was acquired by Bruker, which moved Bruker into the manufacture of electron microscopes.