Today we congratulate Ernst Bauer of Arizona State University, the pioneer and inventor of the Low Energy Electron Microscope (LEEM) on his 96th birthday. The entire LEEM/PEEM community is very grateful to him for his enormous contribution to surface science research and his constant and unwavering support to the entire research community. For more than 60 years now, we have all been using his brilliant idea of using surface emission and interaction of electrons to directly observe surface-related processes. 


FOCUS has also benefited greatly from this idea in its company’s history. The principle of using photoemission as an imaging microscopic method fascinated us from the very beginning. Today, we are proud to provide the scientific community instruments capable of visualizing space-, momentum-, time-, and spin-resolved electron emission from surfaces.  


It was a big honor for us to welcome Ernst to our facility in Hünstetten, close to Frankfurt, Germany. Our R&D team showed him the performance of our newest photoemission microscope “NanoESCA MARIS” and answered his profound questions about the new developments. He said that he was deeply impressed by what was accomplished here and that he hopes for an increased interest of the NanoESCA with Au/Ir Spin-Filter for the development of nanomagnetic storage devices.  
He was as well impressed by the electron beam welding product line of FOCUS, saying, that he sees big chances for it in the growing demands of new technologies. 


Thank you for your interest in our company, Ernst! We wish you a happy birthday, a lot of health and an endless fascination for science and technology! 

Text & Images: Michael Merkel, Marten Patt