The Nasdaq-listed analytical equipment firm Bruker has acquired Anasys Instruments, the Santa Barbara, California, company that has developed super-resolution infrared spectroscopy and thermal measurement instruments.
The deal, for an undisclosed sum, adds world-leading expertise and products in the areas of Raman and Fourier Transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, atomic force microscopy (AFM), and white-light interferometric 3D microscopy to Bruker’s already vast portfolio.
Anasys is best known for its nanoprobe-based thermal and infrared equipment, with its “nanoIR” tools used by several leading academic and industrial scientists and engineers working on soft-matter and hard-matter materials science, and in life science applications.
The latest version of nanoIR offers state-of-the-art 10 nm resolution that overcomes the classical diffraction limit imposed on optical microscopes by Abbe’s Law.
The company’s cutting-edge offering provides a combination of AFM and infrared spectroscopy. Alexandre Dazzi, a professor at the Laboratoire de Chimie Physique at the Université Paris-Sud in France, is credited with inventing the technique, which Anasys subsequently commercialized. It combines the precision of AFM with the chemical specificity of infrared absorption spectroscopy.
Cutting-edge applications
Mark Munch, president of the “NANO” business division at Bruker, into which Anasys will be incorporated, said: "There are tremendous application and technology synergies that will benefit our customers."
The Bruker NANO division offers a wide range of X-ray techniques, alongside some optics-based tools in the form of spark optical emission spectrometers, and fluorescence microscopes. It also sells a line of AFM equipment.
Roshan Shetty, the University of Arizona graduate with a masters degree in optical sciences who co-founded Anasys, added: “We are very happy to have found a company like Bruker to take the business to the next level. We feel that Bruker's history in innovative instrument research, and Bruker’s global reach will build on our own history of unique and pioneering achievements in thermal and nanoIR measurements.”
Recent high-profile applications of the company’s “nanoIR2” kit have included a study of shale by a research team at the oil and gas equipment giant Schlumberger, who revealed new details into the way that oil hydrocarbons are formed.
Another team, this time at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, used the nanoIR2 it to prove that remains of biological entities were present in sedimentary rock 3.7 billion years old – thought to be the oldest signs of life in the Earth’s geological record.
Anasys corporate video - nanoIR2 capability:
