Company History

Brookhaven Instruments was founded in 1981 by Dr. Bruce Weiner, a physical chemist, and Dr. Walther Tscharnuter, a physicist. The two met in 1970 as postdoctoral associates working under Prof. Ben Chu at Stony Brook University, who was leading one of the only laboratories in the world at that time investigating Dynamic Light Scattering (DLS).

brookhaven's 40th anniversary

1981

Company founded by Dr. Bruce Weiner, a physical chemist, and Dr. Walther Tscharnuter, a physicist

1980s

Brookhaven Instruments pioneers high-resolution particle sizing with the DCP and XDC centrifuge

1990s

Zeta potential, for the characterization of charge on colloids, proteins and nanoparticles, with Dr. Tscharnuter’s ground-breaking design of the first commercially available Phase Analysis Light Scattering instrument, the ZetaPALS. These systems originally included a built-in desktop computer and monitor but as computing technology shrank, this became no longer necessary.

1991

The first single-board correlator, the BI-9000AT

1993

First combined DLS instrument for sizing and ELS, electrophoretic light scattering, for zeta potential

1994

First backscatter DLS instrument commercially available for concentrates, the FOQELS

1998

First instrument to combine four light scattering technologies in one instrument – DLS, ELS, SLS, and PALS – for protein, nanoparticle and polymer characterization

2002

Small-volume, flow-through, fixed angle SLS instrument, the BI-MwA, for Size Exclusion Chromatography

2009

ParSEC, a full-featured Chromatography software package

2010

Particle Solutions, an integrated software package for running DLS, SLS, ELS, & PALS in one instrument

2013

Combining backscatter for protein and nanoparticle sizing, 90º for colloid sizing, and 15º for zeta potential, three angles in one instrument in the NanoBrook Omni

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