World first facility to offer unprecedented insights into materials

With a £3m grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Surrey will work with Hants-based SME Ionoptika and Manchester University to deliver a new Multimodal Ion Beam Imaging Facility that will allow researchers and businesses to better understand materials.

In a statement, Professor Melanie Bailey, principal investigator of the project from Surrey University, said: "The fact that Surrey and, indeed, the UK has the ambition to build this truly unique facility should not only excite researchers in academia and industry, but it signals that we are serious about breaking new ground in a range of scientific areas."

The facility – housing a multimodal 3D elemental and molecular imaging system at a sub-micron scale - will be the first in the world to use beams of charged particles at high and low energies to measure biological systems and materials.

The high-energy beams will be delivered by a particle accelerator at the UK National Ion Beam Centre, a national research facility funded by EPSRC and led by Professor Roger Webb at Surrey.