Imperial and UCL celebrate five years of nanotechnology research

It is a truth universally acknowledged that all mad scientists must carry out their ingenious experiments in a basement. But most of us have absolutely no idea what goes on beneath the floors of our faculties. At Imperial, some of our most ingenious pieces of research are carried out by the London Centre for Nanotechnology (LCN), which has just celebrated its fifth anniversary. A collaboration between Imperial and UCL, it covers such a large range of research that it could not be contained in a single basement and is now carried out across both campuses.

The co-director of the LCN is Milo Shaffer, also the warden of Holbein and Willis Jackson Hall. His group aims to contribute science that “can make a real difference to the world around us.” He could be right; in the last five years, their researchers have “discovered magnetic analogues of electric charge, found new ways to manipulate light... and developed new ways to screen for antibiotic resistance in bacteria.” What’s more, they also offer two Masters programs at Imperial.

The LCN is very unusual, in that not only does it involve two of the best universities in London working together, but the team itself is completely multi-disciplinary. Chemists, medics, biochemists, biologists, physicists and material scientists are all striving towards a common goal: working with materials on the nanometre scale to improve the efficiency of instruments and ideas, to analyse materials at a level that was not possible before, and then to apply that knowledge to all kinds of fields – including healthcare, physics and engineering.

Beneath the floors of the Royal School of Mines lurks one of the most interesting experiments: TITAN, a £6m electron-microscope with correction for spherical aberration, the first of its kind in the UK. By connecting it to sophisticated software, TITAN can take images on an atomic level, allowing us to view single atoms with the naked eye (on a computer screen). Recently, it has been used to study replacement hip-joints – these have always suffered from oxygen degradation, and the team hope to find exactly why this happens and how to counteract it. They are also looking into regenerative medicine, and how and why Alzheimer’s progresses as it does.

The first five years of the London Centre for Nanotechnology have been, by anyone’s estimation, hugely successful. What happens in the next five years could be even more interesting.