Bespoke Designs
CUSTOMISED TO YOUR NEEDS
Bespoke Ion Beam Solutions
Ionoptika offers a custom vacuum instrumentation service, ranging from custom-designed Ion Beam solutions and vacuum chambers to fully bespoke instruments. With over three decades of experience building world-class instrumentation for universities around the world, Ionoptika has the expertise to help you with your next project. If you have a project in mind, please get in touch – we would be delighted to discuss it with you.
How we can help
Services we offer
Read about some of the exciting projects we’ve delivered in the case studies below.
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Case Studies
University of Surrey
“Ionoptika’s Water Cluster SIMS technology has already delivered groundbreaking research in multi-omics. At the University of Surrey, we are delighted to be working in collaboration with Ionoptika to build the next generation of the Water Cluster SIMS around our MeV beamline, enabling multimodal and elemental imaging in fields as diverse as lipidomics and battery materials.”
“Their team helped us to obtain funding for this initiative by providing access to their laboratory to provide proof of concept data, and we have worked together with their engineers to design the system, which will be unique internationally.”
Professor Melanie Bailey
Director, BBSRC SEISMIC Facility for spatially resolved single and sub-cellular “omics.”
University of Surrey
What does this mean going forward?
Thanks to a £3 million grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Surrey will work with Ionoptika and the University of Manchester to deliver a new Multimodal Ion Beam Imaging Facility, which will allow researchers and businesses to understand materials at an unprecedented microscopic level.
State-of-the-art facilities.
The facility will house a multimodal 3D elemental and molecular imaging system at a sub-micron scale. The new system will be the first in the world to use beams of charged particles at high and low energies to measure biological systems and materials. The high-energy beams will be delivered by a particle accelerator at the UK National Ion Beam Centre, a national research facility funded by EPSRC and led by Professor Roger Webb at Surrey. The system will produce X-rays, gamma rays, and particles, and the combination of this information will give a detailed map of the elemental and molecular makeup of materials.
To find out more about how our products operate, visit our techniques page.
Stigmatic Imaging SIMS – The Rosalind Franklin Institute
This fascinating project began with the simple brief of providing an Ion Beam for a prototype SIMS instrument at the Rosalind Franklin Institute (RFI). Initially, the customer planned to build the rest of the instrument, including the UHV chamber, XYZ stage, and imaging system.
However, the experts at the RFI and the University of Oxford recognised that Ionoptika had the capabilities and experience to supply the complete system. So, instead of spending all of their time building up a test bed before starting, they could focus their valuable time and efforts on more critical aspects of the project.
What does this mean going forward?
The new stigmatic imaging SIMS instrument is now installed at the University of Oxford. This new type of mass spectrometry imaging decouples acquisition time from spatial resolution, enabling rapid molecular mapping of biological tissues at unprecedented speed.
“We initially approached Ionoptika about providing an Ion Beam for our novel stigmatic imaging SIMS project. However, given their expertise in this area, our discussions quickly turned to Ionoptika designing much more of the basic instrument for us. This has been very helpful as it has allowed us to focus on other key aspects of the project. They have been fantastic to work with on this project. They are very open and helpful and have a very collaborative approach that has really helped to improve the final design. My expectations have certainly been met, and I would highly recommend them to anyone thinking of building an instrument for their lab.”
Professor Mark Brouard
Professor of Chemistry
“Prior to moving the instrument, I was able to spend time at Ionoptika headquarters, testing the instrument. This was a great experience, and the team at Ionoptika were brilliant and very efficient. I am looking forward to continuing to work with the team at Ionoptika and the University of Oxford to continue to develop this prototype.”
Dr Felicia Green
Rosalind Franklin Institute
You can learn more about how our products work in real-world scenarios by reading a publication.
Single Ion Implantation Tool – University of Surrey
In a three-year project between Ionoptika and the University of Surrey, a new custom instrument was commissioned in 2016 to implant single ions with extremely high precision deterministically.
Named Single Ion Multi-species Positioning at Low Energy (SIMPLE), Ionoptika installed the instrument in 2018. It comprises a custom, highly focused, sub-20 nm mass-filtered ion column, a nano-precision stage, and a high-sensitivity single ion implantation detection system. Based on the SIMPLE platform, Ionoptika launched the Q-One instrument in 2019.
“At this point in time, I still do not know of a competing instrument with the capabilities provided by the Q-One product, and I would like to offer my praise for the instrument that Ionoptika designed and built to meet our requirements. It has been and continues to be a great pleasure working with your team at Ionoptika on such a collaborative venture.”
Professor Roger Webb
Director of Surrey Ion Beam Centre, University of Surrey
