Hardware performance of a scanning system for high speed analysis of nuclear emulsions

The use of nuclear emulsions in very large physics experiments is now possible thanks to the recent improvements in the industrial production of emulsions and to the development of fast automated microscopes. In this paper the hardware performances of the European Scanning System   (ESS) are described. The ESS is a very fast automatic system developed for the mass scanning of the emulsions of the OPERA experiment, which requires microscopes with scanning speeds of ∼20cm2/h in an emulsion volume of 44μm thickness.