Seiko Instruments Inc

Agency of Industrial Science and Technology

Seiko Instruments & Electronics Ltd.

Chikara Miyata

Masatoshi Yasutake

Shigeru Wakiyama

Hiroyoshi Yamamoto

Hideo Hoshi

Hiroshi Bando

Hiroshi Ishijima

Ikuo Nanno

Hiroshi Tokumoto

Fumiki Sakai

Seiji Hoshi

Shigeru Inagaki

Atsunobu Nakajima

In a tunneling unit of a scanning tunneling microscope (STM), a rough feed mechanism for approaching a sample and a probe to a tunnel area is disposed separately (or is provided to a stage on a sample side, for example), a fine movement element block is formed as a separate unit and the tunnel unit main body is made compact and provided with high rigidity so that it can be mounted to an optical microscope or a laser microscope. If the fine movement element block of the tunnel unit is mounted to a revolver of an optical microscope or the like, rotation positioning accuracy of the revolver is a few microns. Therefore, high precision positioning of the position to be observed by STM can be attained by optical means and measurement having high resolution in an nm order can be conducted by use of STM. Since STM can be mounted to an existing apparatus in accordance with the present invention, measurement accuracy can be improved drastically and the invention is extremely useful industrially.

Scanning tunneling microscope

The amount of deformations such as expansions or contractions of a substance caused in accordance with irradiation of cyclically interrupted monochromatic light is detected by either the changes in a tunnel current sensitive to the changing distance between a sample surface and a detection probe or the amount of changes in a probe fine feed mechanism keeping the tunnel current constant between a sample surface and a detection probe at all times, so that the absorption spectrum intrinsic to the substance relative to the irradiating optical energy according to its wavelength is measured to examine the optical properties of the substance.

Tunnel current detecting photo-acoustic spectrometer

An apparatus actuates an objective lens in axial and circumferential directions through annular magnetic gaps which are formed by yokes and a magnet. In order to retain the objective lens in the neutral position in the circumferential direction, two or four magnetic pieces are mounted on a lens mount and disposed near the circumferetial ends of the annular magnetic gaps in which the force caused by the magnetic potential energy in the magnetic gaps acts on the magnetic pieces to pull them back in the direction of the magnetic gaps so that a magnetic spring for retaining the objective lens at the neutral position is formed by the magnetic pieces.

Apparatus for actuating objective lens

Growing community of inventors

Tokyo, Japan

Chikara Miyata