Well, I’m really late writing this, but a big thank you to Tom Kelly and everyone at Imago for putting together the reconstruction summit. Mineral Point, WI is extremely cold in February, but it was an ideal place to get a small group of scientists together for brainstorming. The Jones Mansion is quite a nice place, too. You can see the room I stayed in on their homepage — in the picture on the left, right through the bright doorway.

The scientific content of the meeting is under “Gordon Conference” style embargo, meaning that none of the
participants are free to discuss the content, but I can say what I took away from it as future work for myself. One of the basic issues with the current data workflow for the LEAP right now is that the raw data files from the LEAP are in a less-than-fully-open format.

That’s not good for researchers, because its hard to tinker with data that’s trapped in a proprietary format. That’s not good for Imago, either, because the last thing Imago wants to spend time and effort on is tinkering with reconstruction algorithms. So there’s a need for some common code to interpret and make accessible the large amounts of data in a raw data from the LEAP. I’m one of the people who volunteered to help maintain a repository of code. We’ll need the cooperation of the folks at Imago, but we’ll see how it goes.

And for the record, I tried cheese curds, but they didn’t squeak.

Imago is hosting a two-day mini conference on reconstruction issues in 3D Atom Probe Feb 5 and 6 in Mineral Point, Wisconsin. Maybe more like a retreat, as Mineral Point is a rather out-of-the-way bit of Wisconsin — a bit of history, and bit of artist colony, a bit of bed and breakfast. In any case, it should be a solid two days with Atom Probe scientists from around the world. I just got my tickets a few days ago.

The title says it all. Here’s the press release from Polaron:

Here’s my take on the situation:

Essentially, Polaron is getting out of the Atom Probe business, no doubt because the Imago had better technology and better approach to sales and developing a business. When Oxford’s main competitor was Cameca/Rouen, Oxford had the upside of being the preferable instrument for sales to industry, whereas the Cameca/Rouen instrument was better suited to the research lab.

With the ascendence of Imago’s LEAP, the high end of Oxford’s business was essentially cut off, and Polaron was left to fight for academic scraps with Cameca. Now, Cameca might be able to justify that because of their other academic oriented research instruments, and with the level of the collaboration they have with Rouen. Polaron, however, found it just wasn’t worth it for the small market that exists for Atom Probes.

Imago, meanwhile, gets a significantly cleaner playing field and some technology thrown in as well, so as long as the price doesn’t sink them, it seem like a good deal for them. Polaron, meanwhile, exits gracefully from the market with a little cash and a continuing investment, and more time to focus on their core business. Not a bad deal there, either.

Imago ’s March newsletter is on the web.

Imago, of course, is the manufacturer of the LEAP ( Local Electrode Atom Probe), the technique which has really increased the data collection rate for 3D Atom Probe, and with this technique the analysis volume of a 3D ATom Probe Sample has increased more than tenfold, opening up completely new research challenges.

NUCAPT has a web page devoted to Apex. Thanks for maintaining that, Richard!