Congratulations Dr Alsaedi!

Many congratulations to Abdul on the award of his PhD!  His thesis is entitled Characterisation of Battery Materials Using Surface Science Techniques and describes novel methods and results using ToF-SIMS and HAXPES to explore the interfacial chemistry of electrode materials.  Thanks to his External Examiner Prof Sven Schroeder from the University of Leeds. Abdul is currently Lecturer at the University of Jeddah.  Well done Abdul!

SIMS-24 Conference

It was a busy week at SIMS-24 in La Rochelle, France, with presentations from Abdul, Akhila, Matija, Alex and Nick.  Congratulations to the Co-Chairs Alain Brunelle, Jean-Paul Barnes and their teams for a great conference!

 

Nature Reviews Publication

Together with fellow SIMS experts from around the world we have published a new Primer ‘Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry‘ in Nature Reviews Methods. The manuscript describes the operating principles of SIMS and outlines how the instrument geometry and operational parameters enable different modes of operation and information to be obtained. Applications, including materials science, surface science, electronic devices, geosciences and life sciences, are explored, finishing with an outlook for the technique.

You can view the formatted article here

New Collaboration: Multimodal Ion Beam Imaging facility

We are excited to announce a new collaboration with The Surrey Ion Beam Centre on a new £3m project ‘Multimodal 3D elemental and molecular imaging at the sub-micron scalefunded by the EPSRC.  The project, led by Prof Melanie Bailey at the University of Surrey, will be achieved.by combining MeV ion beam analysis (X rays, gamma rays, backscattered particles) and water cluster Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (SIMS) for the first time in a single instrument.

Happy 80th John!

We recently got together with some alumni and friends of the group to celebrate John Vickerman’s 80th Birthday with a meal and drinks in Manchester city centre.  It was great to catch up with everyone. Congratulations John!

 

Welcome Abdulrhman

The world urgently needs better battery technology to rapidly move towards a low‐carbon society. However, commercially‐available batteries currently do not store enough energy, have limited working lifetimes, and are too expensive to make large‐scale electrification viable. To design improved batteries, a better understand of chemical processes inside a battery during charging and discharging is needed. This requires measuring the flow of ions and electrons across multiple interfaces, buried within the battery. Abdulrhman’s PhD project will develop methodologies to study these interfaces using secondary ion mass spectrometry and X‐ray photoelectron spectroscopy.  The project is co-supervised by Dr Alex Walton.