J. A. Panitz is the co-inventor of the Atom-Probe Field Ion Microscope

Atom probe

The atom probe is a microscope used in material science that was invented in 1967 by Erwin Wilhelm Müller, J. A. Panitz, and S. Brooks McLane. The atom probe is closely related to the method of Field Ion Microscopy, which is the first microscopic method to achieve atomic resolution, occurring in...

and the inventor of the 10-cm atom-probe, the Imaging Atom-Probe, the LIFE detector (a liquid field-emission chemical sensor), Isothermal Ramped Field-Desorption Spectroscopy (the electric field analog of Thermal Desorption Spectroscopy), Field-Ion tomography(for non destructive imaging of biological molecules in high electric fields), and the PhotoFEEM technique (for nanoscale mapping of work function variations on a metal surface). J. A. Panitz discovered the field-adsorption phenomenon. The 10-cm Atom-Probe and the Imaging Atom-Probe are the progenitors of all later atom probe instruments including the commercial instruments available today.