[Half a century of electron microscopy in Serbia].

The first electron microscope was designed in 1931 by Ernest Ruska, as his diploma thesis at the Faculty of Engineering in Berlin; it was designed on the bases of Busch’s theory about electronic lens. (Fg.1). The microscope had magnification of only 17 times. In his doctoral dissertation in 1933 Ernest Ruska developed a new electron microscope with three electromagnetic lenses. The magnification was 12.000x, and resolution 50 nm, which is four times more than the resolution of the optical microscope (200nm). The replica of that microscope from 1933 was made by the constructor for the exhibition “300 years of microscope and biology cell” which took place in Berlin, in 1980. For that epochal invention E.Ruska got half of the Nobel Prize for physics in 1986. The other half of the prize was divided by two scientists, Binning and Rohrer from Zurich, also for the epochal invention-tunneling of electrons, only 12 years after the scientific report on completely new type of microscopy with atomic resolution was published. Binning and Rohrer brilliantly applied the so called tunnel effect, for which Gamov received the Nobel Prize for physics in 1929. Scanning tunnel microscope (STM) provides the atomic and submolecular resolution. The sample can be looked under vacuum, but also in air, gas or liquid envirioment. Prof. Djuro Koruga at the Technical Faculty in Belgrade has been a successful principal of the well-known school STM for years. Soon the microscope triggered a series of inventions of new microscopes. It includes: the atomic force microscope (ASM), the magnetic force microscope MSM, the photon tunneling microscope (FTM or PTM), near field optical scanning microscope (BPOSM or NFOSM). The common characteristic of all these microscopes is the existence of probe, either electronic or photonic, which searches the sample, and the common name for these instruments is the microscopy of the scanning probe.