Recent efforts have avoided focussing elements and instead are directly collimating a beam with a pinhole. The lack of atom optics means that the beam width will be significantly larger than in an electron microscope. The first published demonstration of a two-dimensional image formed by helium reflecting from the surface was by Witham and Sánchez, who used a pinhole to form the helium beam. A small pinhole is placed very close to a sample and the helium scattered into a large solid angle is fed to a detector. Images are collected by moving the sample around underneath the beam and monitoring how the scattered helium flux changes.