infocus #62 June 2021 Safe remote control of electron and ion microscopes

DOI: 10.22443/rms.inf.1.204

Microscope managers can manage microscopes efficiently and provide users better service remotely, for the following reasons:

• Operating the microscope from any location
• Enhancing collaboration efficiently and
economically by sharing the remote operation
• Providing instant support to users who
encounter issues
• Supporting users on the way, e.g. by working
from your mobile
• Working away from a microscope to reduce
interference
• Working when physical lab access is not
permitted
• Providing training to users who cannot access
the lab
• Providing training to a class of students instead
of the traditional 3-5 users per training session
• Conducting data transfer remotely

Traditionally, all the electron microscope training, support, service and management has had to be performed physically in the lab [Figure 1]. It usually requires users to attend the lab physically which means users might have to travel long distances, incurring a large amount of cost and expense.

With increasingly internationalised research activities, the ability to conduct real-time viewing of imaging and the analysis process without attending the site has become a valuable practice. In addition, modern microscopes are often equipped with multimodal analysis capabilities which are complicated and take longer experimental time than conventional microscopy analysis.

There has been an increasing requirement on the monitoring of the microscope health and a prevalence of experiments of increasing duration.