Welcome to the web pages of the Analytical Science Projects (ASP) Group.

Stop Press:

• Invited paper presented at ISRP 11, Melbourne, September 2009 here
  

• ASP has contributed an article on the future needs of heritage science in the areas of nanotechnology, synchrotron and neutron source provision to the influential EU White paper GENNESYS.
  

• ASP has been awarded a grant from the Paul Instrument Fund to develop our synchrotron environmental cell and micro XEOL concepts. 
• This is complimented by the award of an ESRF long-term project, guaranteeing synchrotron beam time for the next 3 years.
• The University of Warwick has been awarded funding from the UK Science and Innovation initiative to set up the Warwick Centre for Analytical Science.  The focus will be an interdisciplinary collaboration between the Departments of Chemistry, Physics and Statistics in the areas of microscopy, mass spectrometry, and large volume data handling and will involve many other departments at Warwick as well as industry and academia world-wide.  

Colloquia:

The recent colloquium presented to the Physics Department by Eric Doryhée (Institut Néel, CNRS Grenoble) can be seen here

Overview

Our research focuses on the development of novel instrumentation, methods and data processing techniques to analyse the previously unanalysable, preferably at high spatial resolution.  We currently have two main areas of activity:

Secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS)

Heritage science studies in controlled environments

We also provide a research-based analytical service, principally for other universities. 

The group has been part of the Physics Department at Warwick since 1986, and was originally devoted to the development and application of novel instrumentation for secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS), especially in the area of Advanced Semiconductors; hence our original name "Advanced SIMS Projects".  Since then we have diversified, and now work both in SIMS and other areas of analytical science - especially in the development of synchrotron-based analytical tools and methods for cultural heritage and other research.  So, in 2007, we changed our name to Analytical Science Projects, keeping the same acronym and logo.

The human race's 30,000 year old struggle to develop new materials has always thrown up similar challenges and problems (materials recognition, miniaturization, corrosion and its prevention, tailoring of properties ...), but with increasing levels of refinement and (usually) decreasing scale-lengths.  Novel analytical instrumentation must be invented to enable such developments, and this must be supported by robust application and data analysis methods.  So, our remit is to find an analytical challenge, devise instrumentation to meet it, apply the instrumentation and develop data processing methods to handle the output.

PhD students and PDRAs are at the heart of these activities.  They can expect to enhance their expertise in some or all of the following areas:

• Scientific instrument design and realization
  
• Ion and electron optics
• Programming for instrument control and data analysis
• Cutting edge analytical techniques (uleSIMS, SRXRD, XAS)
• Time resolved analysis in controlled environments
  

See here for more information