London Centre for Nanotechnology

Posted: January 15, 2012 at 4:46 pm

The other day I got out of the office and went to poke around the London Centre for Nanotechnology’s labs at Imperial College London. It’s always great to meet people and put faces to names, but it’s also sometimes really helpful to actually see the equipment that’s used. It’s all very well to read about pulsed laser deposition, for example, but it’s another thing entirely to nose around the HUGE piece of kit that is actually used to do it. Sometimes it seems like you need even bigger equipment as you start working at smaller scales.

— Titan Microscope

About half of what you can see is the aberration correction section that allows such good resolution

OK, that’s a bit of a generalisation maybe. But the TITAN microscope, with its aberration correction,shows that to get true atomic resolution, the equipment needs to be even bigger than before. But although the kit that corrects for the spherical symmetry of the lenses adds to the height of the microscope, it means you can see brilliantly sharp images of crystal lattices and interfaces, or where metal nanoparticles end up in cells.

I also had a real brain work out looking at the work being done on magnetic monopoles in synthetic spin ices, that made me realise that sometimes the simple things you take for granted are the things you really don’t understand at all. Essentially these monopoles can jump around the lattice much like electrons on a semiconductor, or at least that’s how I’ve come to terms with it in my brain. Currently though, these phenomena aren’t very well understood and only happen at very low (sub 10K) temperatures, but could lead to spintronics and molecular memory devices. So, a bit more complex than the shaking iron filings around a bar magnet.

The real fun came a bit later though, when I got to play with the Emisense liquid scanner. I’m sure we’re all frustrated with the small amount of liquids that we’re allowed to take in hand luggage and loads of people are working on ways to test liquids when you go through security. Personally though, I don’t really want anyone opening up my water and sticking probes or dip sticks inside. Ideally you need a scanner that works at about the same speed as the trundling x-ray scanner that checks your suitcase for nail files. The EMILI 2 uses an evanescent microwave field to identify liquids using dielectric permittivity, molecular relaxation and ionic conductivity. More importantly it does this quickly (within a second of you putting ta bottle on the scanner) and gives a simple yes/no readout, as you can see below.