Acutance Scientific Ltd

Our products

HR EBSD

CrossCourt maps all 9 components of the strain tensor at 10’s of nm spatial resolution scale, together with Geometrically Necessary Dislocations and stress maps, using EBSD data.

PiFM

Vista IR chemically maps samples at the ~5nm spatial resolution scale, with applications in bioscience, polymers, 1D/2D materials, semiconductors, plasmonics amongst others, using Photoinduced Force Microscopy.

Tensile Stages

The TS1500 and TS1000 in situ tensile stages retrofit to most SEMs. They are designed by EBSD experts to give optimal EBSD performance, with excellent field record.

Heating Stages

The HSEA1000 and HSEA500 in situ heating stages retrofit to most SEMs. They are designed by EBSD experts to give optimal EBSD performance, with excellent field record.

Dr Ian Holton

About us

Acutance Scientific Ltd.

Acutance Scientific Ltd. was founded by Dr Ian Holton in 2011 with the aim of bringing highly innovative nano instrumentation to real problems in the research community. It has been a great pleasure, over the last 10 years, to bring such new real solutions to solve real research problems and to see new nano instrumentation take off and grow as a result.

At present, new technologies which really excite us are Photo-induced Force Microscopy, a sub ~5nm NanoIR technique which has considerable advantages over conventional techniques such as sSNOM and TERS. We are equally excited about CrossCourt HREBSD, a technique uniquely capable of measuring all nine components of the strain tensor on the 100 nm spatial resolution scale.  

Ian Holton was Research and Development Director/Chief Physicist of various nano instrumentation companies, and Managing Director of an Electron Microscope company, before founding Acutance Scientific Ltd.

Acutance Scientific Ltd

Our process

Understand

Our first aim is always to understand the experimental aim and requirements for a desired project.

Provide

Our first aim is always to understand the experimental aim and requirements for a desired project.

Ensure

Our first aim is always to understand the experimental aim and requirements for a desired project.

Out in front

Innovative compositional analysis

Acutance Scientific brings the most innovative tools in compositional analysis to the market. From mapping the full distortion tensor and Geometrically Necessary Dislocations at the Electron Microscope resolution to the revolutionary technique of Photo-induced Force Microscopy, here is a combination of instruments of the future and quality/performance benchmarks.

It is only possible to give a very limited presentation of the capabilities of these instruments on this website.

Please contact us for further details.

Updates

Application Notes

HR EBSD
Grain boundary strain in annealed nickel base alloy

A study using High Resolution (HR) EBSD to investigate anomalously high elastic strain measured near grain boundaries in an annealed sample of nickel based superalloy.

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PiFM
1D/2D Materials

Nanoscale Identification of MoS2 Layers and Defects / Monolayer Detection on MoSe2 / Confocal Raman Mapping and PiFM on Graphene

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PiFM
Polymer Films

Identifying Components in Polymer Films via hyPIRTM Imaging

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Get in touch

Let us know if you have any questions and we’d be happy to help.

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