Förklaring:

An atom probe tomography (APT) instrument is a state-of-the-art laboratory materials characterization tool inspired by J. A. Panitz. Field Desorption Spectrometer. United States Patent 3,868,507 (l975). Various refinements have been made over time including the position-sensitive atom probe (PoSAP) by A. Cerezo et al. (1988) at Oxford University and the Tomographic Atom-Probe (TAP) by D. Blavette et al. (1993) at the University of Rouen. The PoSAP and TAP instruments were commercialized by the spin-out company Oxford NanoScience and CAMECA (Gennevilliers, Fr) respectively. Most modern-day APT instruments are called Local Electrode Atom Probes (LEAP) and were first introduced in 2003 by Imago Scientific Instruments. AMETEK Inc. acquired Oxford NanoScience in 2006, then CAMECA in 2007, and finally Imago Scientific Instruments in 2010, making AMETEK- CAMECA Instruments Inc. the sole commercial developer of APTs.

The AMETEK- CAMECA Instruments Inc. company holds many key patterns for 3D atomic-scale imaging using APT. Thus, under Swedish law: LOU - 6 kap. 14 § 2 & 3 lag (2016:1145) AMETEK-CAMECA is the only company that can meet the technical requirements of energy-compensated position-sensitive time-of-flight, Patent number: 8502139, necessary to analyze complex alloys with APT.

The Hultgren Laboratory intends to purchase a high-performance atom probe tomography (APT) instrument from the company AMETEK- CAMECA Instruments Inc. This choice is made since they are the sole commercial developer who services over 100 instruments worldwide, which means that there is no other option than to build an instrument. The option to build is only suitable for instrument researchers which requires extensive experience and skills currently not available in Sweden.