h+ Magazine

Carl Zeiss is known for creating desirable lenses, but did you know their creations aren’t limited to just enabling you to get a crisp clean snapshot of your night out on the town? Their division, Carl Zeiss SMT, makes specialized lenses for scientific use, including lenses for the delicate work of “brain mapping and soft tissue imaging.” They have several lenses for brain mapping: the SIGMATM FE-SEM, the ZEISS CrossBeam® workstations, the ORION® Helium-ion microscope and the LIBRA® 120 PLUS.

With the LIBRA®120 PLUS, you don’t just get an image. It reveals “structural and 3-D information of beam sensitive or frozen hydrated specimens at the nano scale.”

Brain-mapping is a daunting undertaking, even with the technology we have today. For scientists and researchers to be able to accomplish and see what they need to propel the research forward, they need the right tools. The people at Carl Zeiss SMT saw that need and the demand for a lens that could get deeper and take images of the brain that were clear, small (think below nanometer level), and easy on the samples that were being imaged. They were able to meet these needs by coming up with lenses that will help make the formidable task of seeing and understanding how the brain operates a little less daunting.