Albert Crewe

Albert Victor Crewe (February 18, 1927 – November 18, 2009) was a British-born American physicist and inventor of the modern scanning transmission electron microscope[1] capable of taking still and motion pictures of atoms, a technology that provided new insights into atomic interaction and enabled significant advances in and had wide-reaching implications for the biomedical, semiconductor, and computing industries.

Crewe was born in Bradford, England, in 1927 and grew up during World War II in a blue collar community still recovering from the worldwide depression.

Skinner and his team were in the process of building a synchrocyclotron accelerator and wanted to improve on existing technology by extracting the circulating beam to produce an external one, a feat which had never been accomplished.

One of the U.S. government's oldest and largest science and engineering research laboratories, Argonne is managed for the U.S. Department of Energy by the University of Chicago.

This work became so interesting to Crewe that in 1967 he decided to leave Argonne and return to the university's physics faculty, which had granted him a full professorship in 1963.

In 1970 his field emission scanning transmission electron microscope succeeded in taking images individual atom[6] (though not the first, this achievement usually being credited to Erwin Muller[7]).

Hitachi Corporation produced the first successful commercial version of the field emission scanning electron microscope in 1970 which received an IEEE Milestone award in 2012.

Today there are over 5000 field emission microscopes operational in semiconductor fabrication facilities worldwide, enabling companies like Intel and IBM to produce the latest and fastest microprocessors.

He continued to explore new methods of obtaining high resolution, and in 2003 developed a low voltage electron microscope using a dipole permanent magnet as a lens.