A national facility in Daresbury is building a new microscope that can watch individual atoms dance at temperatures colder than deep space. The problem is that today’s best electron microscopes damage delicate materials—soft matter, single molecules, quantum crystals—before scientists can see how their electrons behave. This new instrument, called QuantumSTEM, will chill samples to liquid helium temperatures inside a magnetic-field-free chamber, preserving fragile structures while capturing atomic-scale images and chemical fingerprints. It will also let researchers poke samples with electric currents or magnetic fields and watch quantum particles—magnons, gauge bosons—appear and vanish in real time. If it works, QuantumSTEM will give UK scientists a tool that does what resonant inelastic X-ray scattering does, but at a fraction of the cost and with far sharper resolution. This is fundamental science: it will reveal how electrons organise themselves in quantum materials, a field the UK has flagged as strategically important. Similar fundamental microscopy breakthroughs in the past have enabled everything from smartphone chips to better catalysts. The immediate payoff is understanding, not a product—but understanding how atoms arrange and rearrange is what eventually rewires the technologies we take for granted.
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This proposal requests funding for the provision of SuperSTEM, the EPSRC National Research Facility for Advanced Electron Microscopy (AdvEM), for 5 years from 14 March 2022, together with additional capital funding for a unique, next-generation instrument with capabilities tailored for the study of quantum materials and phenomena. Since its inception 20 years ago, and since 2011 as the EPSRC NRF for AdvEM, SuperSTEM, has become an internationally renowned user centre. It offers access to world-leading scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) instrumentation and expertise for the direct imaging of atomic structures and the determination of chemical composition, bonding and vibrational properties, with a focus on single-atom precision and sensitivity. The NRF enables the elucidation of structure-property relationships in materials and devices for the benefit of a community drawn from over 30 EPSRC Research Areas, both academic and industrial, in fields as diverse as catalysis, energy conversion and storage, bio-materials, organic and inorganic chemistry, mineralogy, planetary science, nuclear materials, condensed matter physics and quantum materials. The requested funding will provide 5 more years of continued support at a guaranteed service capacity for the worldwide scientific community to access these unique microscopes and expertise not available at institutional level. It will support dedicated collaborative research and training in the interpretation and analysis of AdvEM data. While the Facility's most recent instrument currently boasts internationally leading energy resolutions, this proposal also includes a visionary plan and funding request for a next-generation instrument with transformative capabilities. In particular, the ability to observe samples at liquid helium temperatures in a magnetic-field-free sample environment, while maintaining ultra-high energy and spatial resolution would be world-unique. This new QuantumSTEM instrument will enable the study of the electronic structure of materials across phase or state transitions, as well as the vibrational fingerprinting of soft matter (such as single molecules, biomaterials, molecular crystals, etc...), bringing to bear the benefits of monochromation on a wider range of systems where low temperature observation can help mitigate beam damage or induce novel physical phenomena. Combined with external sample stimulation by varying the magnetic field materials experience within the microscope, or subjecting them to controlled electrothermal stimuli, the spectroscopic signature of quantum phenomena, e.g. quasiparticles beyond phonons (gauge bosons, magnons), will become accessible at the atomic scale. These themes are central to the emerging field of quantum materials, an area of strategic importance for UK research investment. QuantumSTEM will expand electron microscopy into experimental territory associated with resonant inelastic X-ray scattering at a fraction of the cost and with orders of magnitude higher spatial resolution and detection efficiency.
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