University of Leeds AFM Facility

This funding provides a dedicated facility manager for the atomic force microscope (AFM) facility situated within the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leeds. The two year grant will enable us to recruit a technical specialist in the applications of AFM after which this experimental officer post will be sustainably funded through consolidation of existing research projects and pump priming of new collaborations. The high quality science that this facility generates across a wide range of different research fields will allow us to recover the true costs of operating the facility via a combination of grant funding and industrial collaboration. The role of the facility manager will be to oversee the efficient day-to-day running of the suite of seven state-of-the-art AFMs.

AFM is a versatile high resolution surface scanning microscopy that can produce topographical and mechanical maps for a wide range of hard and soft materials. It uses a sharp probe, nanometres in radius, to scan across surfaces to produce images with resolution down to the atomic scale. The probe is mounted on a force sensing flexible cantilever spring that can measure the mechanics of materials and molecules to sub-piconewton accuracy. AFM can operate in vacuum, liquid and air environments making it highly suited as an analytical technique for studying a wide range of materials under different conditions. The facility contains instruments that are optimised for high resolution imaging, sensitive and accurate force measurement, high throughput and high speed imaging and a new combined instrument platform integrating AFM with advanced optical microscopy techniques.

The versatility of AFM means it is a critical instrument to enable high quality nanoscience, nanotechnology, soft condensed matter, advanced and functional materials research. Examples of collaborative interdisciplinary research carried out in the facility include: magnetic nanostructures, magnetic spin-ice, skyrmions, crystallisation, synthetic polymers, biomembranes, food nanomechanics, single biomolecule mechanics, therapeutic microbubbles, DNA origami nanostructures, nanoparticles, anti-cancer peptides and biomaterials. These topics relate to research and development of applications within: data storage, data integrity, green energy generation, energy storage, oil recovery, drug delivery, drug formulation, catalysis, biomineralization, anti-cancer agents, hydrogels, tissue engineering, food science and textile development.
We expect the new post to augment impact of UK science within Physics, Chemistry, Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Biomedicine, Biological Sciences, Earth and Environment, Food Sciences and Dentistry.
Current research from the facility falls within the EPSRC themes of Physical Science, Engineering, Manufacturing the Future and Healthcare Technologies. Specific research areas include: Biophysics and soft matter, biomaterials and tissue engineering, magnetism and magnetic materials, spintronics, polymer materials, particle technology, surface science and synthetic biology. The multi-disciplinary research relates to Grand Challenges in: Physics of Life, Physics far from Equilibrium, Nanoscale design of functional materials and Healthcare technologies - developing future therapies. The activities that the facility supports align with the EPSRC Balancing Capabilities strategy since it covers such abroad range of research within the Physical Sciences and Engineering, producing high impact research of societal importance.

Twenty-first century society will be built on understanding and controlling material down to the nanometre scale. AFM is a key tool for characterising and manipulating materials at the nanoscale, be they natural, bioinspired or synthesised. The Leeds AFM facility can make a significant impact across a wide range of important scientific challenges.

The pump priming of a dedicated facility manager (FM) will maximise usage of instrumentation in the Leeds AFM facility, maintain equipment, train new users and actively promote the facility with far more efficiency and efficacy than the current increasingly time limited academic applicants, SDC and NHT. This will impact four constituencies. Firstly, there will be direct and timely support for the very wide range of research that is currently underway, by School of Physics and Astronomy academics, and the groups they collaborate with in the Schools of Chemistry, Food Sciences, Chemical, Electrical and Mechanical Engineering, and Faculties of Biological Sciences and Medicine (see Case For Support). Secondly, new collaborations are being generated at an ever increasing rate from the four EPSRC CDTs making use of AFM Facility, namely CP3, SOFI, MSE and TERM, and recent enquiries from a fifth, the iT-CDT (Integrated Tribology). This large number of new users requires close support in the initial stages of a project. The third area is industry, which has also grown from a trickle in the last 10 years to a flood in the last 2, with ongoing projects with PepsiCo International, Pfizer, Syngenta, Johnson Matthey, and smaller more preliminary projects with P&G, Merck and Astra-Zeneca. These projects are either funded directly at 100% FEC via PDRA's, or as 50% funded PhD project studentships through the CDT's. A further route has developed in the last year through consultancy, and the previous encumbering legal and financial issues surrounding IP, NDA's and contracts have now been solved, the process is well understood. The charge for consultancy can be paid directly into the Facility account and help fund the Facility Manager. Finally, the facility manager will take the major day-to-day load from SDC, allowing him to pursue new projects, and concentrate on lending expert advice where it is needed, providing solutions to industry, and to other academics who do not realise how much AFM could assist their research.

All seven existing instruments are state-of-the-art, having a capital value of £1.9M, and allied to the experience of the two applicants (and their long term collaborators) in developing and applying new techniques, create a facility that whilst currently recognised as a major centre for AFM in the UK (as recognised by the number of national conferences we have hosted, and will host in 2018), could easily grow to be internationally leading. This would impact very positively on the University of Leeds which also houses a vast range of new top-specification electron microscope, including two FEI Titan Krios Cryo-TEM's. In two year's time this advanced microscopy instrumentation will be co-located in the basement of the new Physics/Bragg centre alongside the AFM Facility (in custom built low noise and thermally stable laboratories), which should lead to many new opportunities and synergies. Our instruments form a complementary suite of AFM functionality that spans across the EPSRC remit, from hard to soft condensed matter research. The newest addition is a combined confocal optical/AFM platform to be installed in March 2018 which will greatly increase our research capability. This correlative system is unique to the UK with only one other system currently in Europe. Possessing a Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging Microscope (FLIM) is relatively unusual in itself, but combined with the ultra-high resolution of AFM with ability to measure the same pixel simultaneously with the optical, will create an incredibly powerful system that should be world beating. The Facility is located in a wider Physics department that has Soft Matter as a major speciality, covered by two experimental groups Soft Matter Physics (SMP) and Molecular and Nanoscale Physics (MNP), both exceptionally well equipped for the characterisation of soft matter.