Iowa State will soon be the home to a local electrode atom probe microscope, thanks to a $1.6 million donation from the W. M. Keck Foundation of Los Angeles. The microscope will give Iowa State a large advantage in research, as there are only two other universities in the United States with this type of microscope.

“This acquisition will put ISU in a very enviable position,” said Andrew Hillier, associate professor of chemical and biological engineering. “We will have access to a truly remarkable instrument that very few of our competitors have.”

The microscope will give researchers the capability to look at materials in a very unique way.

“This is an instrument that is going to revolutionize materials science,” said Balaji Narasimhan, associate professor of chemical and biological engineering. “It will let us look at materials in a way that people have never been able to do before. We can take the material apart atom by atom, which essentially makes it the most powerful microscope in the world.”

Hillier explained the microscope is able to generate a three-dimensional picture of the material’s composition at atomic resolution. A typical image contains many millions of atoms that represent a portion of the sample being analyzed.

Some of the first applications of the microscope will involve studying catalyst materials, nanomaterials, aerospace alloys and biomaterials.

Hillier and Narasimhan, along with two other colleagues, wrote a proposal to request funding for the microscope.

These colleagues, Krishna Rajan, professor of materials science and engineering, and Sriram Sundararajan, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, will also have important roles in the laboratory.

“It’s very, very gratifying to be awarded the funding because it’s been a year and a half of effort,” Narasimhan said. “Getting to this stage is absolutely thrilling, but the most exciting stage is what is coming ahead. The real excitement will come when we start looking at the data.”

The microscope will be housed on the third floor of Sweeney Hall in the W. M. Keck Laboratory for High Throughput Atom-Scale Analysis.

Iowa State has given $3.1 million for the creation of the lab.

“The lab will be the primary research center of Iowa State’s Institute for Combinatorial Discovery,” said Pamela Reinig, program director for engineering communications and marketing.

The lab is scheduled to open in the spring of 2007. The microscope is expected to arrive at Iowa State in the next six to nine months.