Light Element Analysis Facility - LEAF

Electron microscopes routinely miss the lightest elements—lithium, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen—because the instruments are built to see heavy metals and semiconductors. This grant buys three new instruments that close that blind spot: an electron probe microanalyser, a soft X-ray emission spectrometer, and a confocal Raman microscope, all housed in an existing electron microscopy centre. Light elements are everywhere in modern technology. Lithium drives batteries. Carbon and oxygen make up polymers, pharmaceuticals, and biological tissues. Without tools that can map these elements at microscopic scales, researchers cannot see why a battery electrode degrades, how a drug crystal forms, or where contaminants hide in a soft material. The new facility will let scientists probe from lithium up to oxygen and beyond, giving detailed chemical and electronic maps of samples that current microscopes treat as invisible. This is a fundamental analytical capability, not a single application. If it succeeds, it will underpin research across energy storage, lightweight manufacturing, biomedical materials, and organic electronics. Better understanding of light-element chemistry at the nanoscale could improve battery lifetimes, enable stronger composites, or refine drug delivery systems—but the immediate value is simply seeing what has been invisible.