JENA/Germany, WASHINGTON D.C./USA — At the annual Neuroscience meeting in Washington, D.C., November 15-19, 2014, ZEISS will present ZEISS MultiSEM 505, its new scanning electron microscope (SEM). As the first SEM in the world, the system features 61 beams working in parallel, and offers an unrivaled capture speed of 1220 megapixels per second at a pixel size of 4 nm. This high acquisition speed is used for imaging neural tissue in brain research where it is now possible to observe much bigger samples than before. ZEISS MultiSEM 505 is designed for continual operation and fitted with the intuitive ZEN Software.

Conventional SEMs use a single electron beam, which is guided over the sample surface and by acquiring pixel by pixel an image of the sample is formed. ZEISS MultiSEM uses 61 beams simultaneously, making it possible to acquire 61 images in parallel. Thus large areas can now be imaged very quickly and acquisition times are reduced from years to weeks.

The first users of ZEISS MultiSEM 505 are the laboratories of Jeffrey Lichtman, Harvard University in Cambridge, USA, and Winfried Denk, Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried, Germany. Both are using microscopy to investigate structure and function of the brain. Their results will help to better understand the causes of illnesses such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and develop corresponding treatments.

About ZEISS

ZEISS is an international leader in the fields of optics and optoelectronics. The more than 24,000 employees of ZEISS generated revenue of about 4.2 billion euros in fiscal year 2012/13. Founded in 1846 in Jena, the company is headquartered in Oberkochen, Germany. ZEISS has been contributing to technological progress for more than 160 years. ZEISS develops and produces solutions for the semiconductor, automotive and mechanical engineering industries, biomedical research and medical technology, as well as eyeglass lenses, camera and cine lenses, binoculars and planetariums. ZEISS is present in over 40 countries around the globe with more than 40 production facilities, around 50 sales and service locations and over 20 research and development sites.Carl Zeiss AG is fully owned by the Carl-Zeiss-Stiftung (Carl Zeiss Foundation).

The Microscopy Business Group

The Microscopy business group is the world’s only one-stop manufacturer of light, X-ray and electron microscopes. Its extensive portfolio enables research and routine applications in the life and materials sciences. The Microscopy business group is headquartered in Jena. Additional production and development sites are located in Oberkochen, Göttingen and Munich, as well as in Cambridge in the UK, in Peabody, MA and Pleasanton, CA in the USA. The business group has around 3,000 employees. It generated revenue of 629 million euros in fiscal year 2012/13.