06 September 2024

Two years after the original grant, the procurement of the next generation advanced scanning transmission electron microscope to ARTEMI, has finally come to a conclusion.

Lego model of an electron microscope
Thermo Fischer Scientific will deliver the new microscope to LiU. They provided a lego version in the meantime. Photographer: Olov Planthaber

The ARTEMI grant from the Swedish Infrastructure Research Council stated that a new advanced microscope was to be installed at Linköping University. Due to a weak Swedish Krona and soaring prices for electronics during the pandemic, another grant from the Wallenberg Initiative for Sustainable Materials (WISE) was required to start the procurement, reaching an award decision in the beginning of the summer.

It is now clear that Thermo Fisher Scientific will install their next generation instrument, the “Illiad”, in the dedicated low noise building Ångströmhuset at LiU. The cost for the new instrument is 53 MSEK and it will replace the former microscope, installed in 2011 (at a cost of 43 MSEK). Delivery is expected in December 2025, with the installation process spilling over to early 2026.

The new instrument will exceed the current performance in every imaginable way.

“The most intuitive property of a high-end microscope is resolution” says Per Persson, director of ARTEMI and Professor in Thin Film Physics at LiU. “The new instrument will of course be better at this than our present, but spectroscopy will be nothing but revolutionary and comparable to a synchrotron such as MAXIV”

Lego model of an electron microscope
Thermo Fischer Scientific will deliver the new microscope at LiU. They provided a lego version in the meantime.
The new microscope comes with detectors that allow simultaneous capture of changes in structure and chemistry at high speed and high resolution, hence, the large amount of data will require new local solutions for storage and management.

“We will be able to explore materials with a level of detail that has not been possible in the past. This microscope will benefit a large researcher community in Sweden, both in materials science, inorganic chemistry and in adjacent disciplines”


Contact

Latest news from LiU

Bianca Suanet.

How we can reduce loneliness among older adults

"We need to understand why some individuals become lonely and provide them with support at various levels in society before it happens," says Bianca Suanet, professor at LiU who researches an inclusive society for the elderly.

Male and female researcher in a lab.

Pain relief through artificial touch in new research project

Can a garment made from smart textiles relieve long-term pain? This is what researchers in neuroscience, materials science, pain research, textile science and biomechanics are seeking to find out in a new interdisciplinary research project.

A beaker filled with water where a small solar cell is dissolved.

The next-generation solar cell is fully recyclable

In a study published in Nature, researchers at LiU have developed a method to recycle all parts of a perovskite solar cell repeatedly without environmentally hazardous solvents. The recycled solar cell has the same efficiency as the original one.