A new instrument will slice through soft materials—everything from food to medical implants—and map their chemistry in 3D at the nanoscale, something existing tools cannot do for delicate, hybrid organic-inorganic samples. Current techniques for chemical analysis at tiny scales work well for hard, dry materials like metals or ceramics, but fail for soft, wet, or composite materials—think battery electrodes, biodegradable plastics, or biological tissues. This instrument, a cryo-capable FIBSEM-ToFSIMS, keeps samples frozen and intact while a focused ion beam shaves off nanometre-thin layers and a mass spectrometer identifies the elements and isotopes in each slice. It fills a specific gap: it can analyse volumes 100,000 times larger than an electron microscope can, yet with far finer detail than X-ray methods provide. If successful, the facility will let UK researchers rapidly optimise materials for NetZero technologies—for example, tracing how lithium moves through a battery cathode, or how a biodegradable polymer degrades in soil. It will also support medical device development, food science, and fine chemical manufacturing. The work is fundamentally about building a new analytical capability; its value lies in enabling other scientists to solve practical problems they currently cannot see clearly enough to fix.
View original technical description
The increasing complexity of materials that underpin advances in the digital technologies, additive manufacturing, healthcare, food, energy, environmental and fine chemical sectors requires a step-change in semi-quantitative, isotopic and trace chemical analysis from nanoscale volumes, contextualised in their native 3D structure. Furthermore, with urgent societal pressures for sustainable NetZero technologies, rapid analysis of both synthetic and natural materials over multiple length scales, can facilitate their improvement and optimal utilisation. An integrated UHV FIBSEM-ToFSIMS instrument provides an important tool for surface chemical analysis with isotopic and trace element sensitivity and also enables 3D nanoscale chemical characterisation of materials over volumes of 100,000 cubic micrometres via serial ion beam sectioning. This analysis fills a pivotal gap within correlative workflows for the combined structural and chemical imaging of materials at different length scales: between that probed by light and X-rays, and that obtained using analytical transmission electron microscopy, and ultimately atom probe tomography. The new equipment will possess flexibility to study both hard and also soft materials, via the cryo-workflow, thus increasing UK expertise in analysis of important, hybrid organic-inorganic materials. Such a capability opens up new horizons for the characterisation of complex soft solids (and potentially solid/liquid dispersions) used in a wide range of medical, chemical, structural and electronic applications.
Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.
Is something wrong? Let us know