The ARTEMI grant from the Swedish Infrastructure Research Council stated that a new advanced microscope was to be installed at Linköping University. Due to a weak Swedish Krona and soaring prices for electronics during the pandemic, another grant from the Wallenberg Initiative for Sustainable Materials (WISE) was required to start the procurement, reaching an award decision in the beginning of the summer.
It is now clear that Thermo Fisher Scientific will install their next generation instrument, the “Illiad”, in the dedicated low noise building Ångströmhuset at LiU. The cost for the new instrument is 53 MSEK and it will replace the former microscope, installed in 2011 (at a cost of 43 MSEK). Delivery is expected in December 2025, with the installation process spilling over to early 2026.
The new instrument will exceed the current performance in every imaginable way.
“The most intuitive property of a high-end microscope is resolution” says Per Persson, director of ARTEMI and Professor in Thin Film Physics at LiU. “The new instrument will of course be better at this than our present, but spectroscopy will be nothing but revolutionary and comparable to a synchrotron such as MAXIV”
“We will be able to explore materials with a level of detail that has not been possible in the past. This microscope will benefit a large researcher community in Sweden, both in materials science, inorganic chemistry and in adjacent disciplines”
