Using the force...

Dr Loren Picco is the founder of NanoDynamics, a spin-out of Bristol University aiming to revolutionise the world of Atomic Force Microscopy. Here he tells us how funding and mentoring support from the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Enterprise Hub will be key in taking on the industry

Atomic Force Microscopy is an extremely effective tool for examining the world on the nanoscale. Although widely used in laboratory settings, traditional AFM analyses have in the past proved too slow for use in industry, with a single image taking up to five minutes for specialists to produce. Along with my co-founder Dr Oliver Payton, we have now developed the world’s fastest AFM, capable of taking ten images a second and operated by an intuitive interface easily accessible to the non-specialist.

To celebrate the 20^th anniversary of AFM some years ago, we were able to push our technique up to a record rate of 1,200 frames per second, an improvement of six orders of magnitude on the existing technology.

An AFM can best be compared to a record player: a very sharp needle is kept in contact with the surface to be examined, and as the needle moves up and down the height of surface features can be accurately measured. The slow movement of the needle has made this a very time-consuming process, acceptable to most laboratory researchers but tiresome to those in need of speedier results.

Slow though it may be, AFM is still superior to its competitors in a number of important areas: optical techniques cannot provide the same resolution on the nanoscale, and scanning electron microscopes are hindered by requiring vacuum conditions in which to work.

These advantages have made AFM particularly useful in biology, where nanoscale resolution allows for complex phenomena such as muscle contraction to be understood on a molecular level. Developments in high-speed AFM have thus far tended to move in this direction, resulting in extremely specialised equipment only suitable for particular experiments.

But in fact a highly flexible AFM can be used for a broad range of applications. We have already made use of our system to assist geologists from the University of Bristol and nuclear physicists from the National Nuclear Laboratory in Birmingham with analyses that would not ordinarily have been feasible with the technology.

We believe we have a central role to play in any area where nanoscale information is needed, in industry as well as in academia. These applications are far-reaching although not always obvious. For instance, we have recently completed a highly successful collaboration with EDF Energy to investigate the corrosion properties of steel, helping them minimise wear and extend the life cycle of their reactors.

Further commercialisation of our technology will be made possible thanks to support from the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Enterprise Hub. In addition to being funded as an Enterprise Fellow over the coming year, I benefit from the advice and expertise of Professor Eric Yeatman FREng as my personal mentor. One thing I am particularly keen to learn from him is how to maintain a good relationship with the university during the spin-out process. As somebody who has already been through the process, his advice will be invaluable over the coming months.

Our progress so far has not been without its challenges. Particularly noteworthy among these has been legitimising high-speed AFM as a technique in the eyes of academics. Most researchers in AFM have been quite sceptical of our approach, pointing out that in early iterations of the technology we were unable to tell how much force the needle was applying to the surface.

That forced us to return to our original force measurement calculations, which yielded a number of very surprising answers. Whereas the prevailing wisdom dictated that a faster needle movement would cause more damage to the surface, we discovered that above a certain critical speed the system would enter a low-wear regime. Thanks to those criticisms from our colleagues we’ve been able to legitimately answer those questions and capitalise on that low-wear region.

In the longer term, we would like to see an extremely specialised version of this technology being used for high-definition gene sequencing. We are already partners in a study showing the much higher sensitivity of our system over the gold-standard approaches in use today. Within a few years, we might be able to see high-speed AFM being used to detect the presence of cancerous cells in blood samples. That is the sort of life-changing application I would love to see.