Facilities

Bristol Physics Observatory

This impressive six-metre radio telescope on the roof of the school and is used by our Astrophysics researchers to survey our Galaxy for sources of maser emission. Its Cassegrain geometry has been designed to operate between 4.5 GHz and 25 GHz, making it very suitable for studying water masers at 22.235 GHz. ‌

The front-end converts the signals to an intermediate frequency (IF) near 4.2 GHz; the back end is a fully-digital, real-time Fast Fourier Transform Spectromete.

Optical Observatory

‌The roof of the school of physics is home to a 25-centrimetre optical telescope housed in its own dome. The telescope is mounted on a computerised mount allowing it to point reliably at all parts of the visible sky. The dome has been recently upgraded to a bluetooth system which can also be computer controlled.

The dome upgrade allows the telescope to be used as a remote access facility.  A new camera includes a "guider" which uses bright stars in the image to lock the telescope into position so that it does not drift away from the target of the observation over time. The camera also has a filter wheel that will enable the remote observer to take images through different colour filters.

South West Nuclear Hub

The South West Nuclear Hub houses four National Nuclear User Facilities which belong to the School of Physics. They are tasked with research and development within atomic science in order to devise nuclear energy solutions.

The four facilities are as follows: The Active Nano Mapping Facility (ANM); EXACT (Next Generation Accelerated Characterisation Technologies), FaRMS (Facility for Radioactive Materials Surfaces); and Hot Robotics

NanoESCA

‌‌‌‌The NanoESCA Facility hosts a number of electron spectroscopy and microscopy tools for state-of-the-art surface analysis at the nanoscale. Our instruments provide a unique perspective on the surface electronic properties of materials, enabling a detailed understanding of the surface chemistry, electronic structure or work function to be extracted. We are housed in the NSQI Building, which hosts some of the lowest vibration labs in Europe.

Interface Analysis Centre 

The Interface Analysis Centre Facility is the University of Bristol’s core materials characterisation facility, hosting over £12M of equipment for materials research, including scanning electron microscopes, transmission electron microscopes , focused ion beam, X-ray diffraction, X-ray Tomography, high-speed atomic force microscopy, secondary ion mass spectrometry and raman spectroscopy.

The Facility’s academic, research and technical staff are based in the School of Physics, and collectively have decades of experience in the use and development of these techniques, with a number of new technologies created in the department including electron backscatter diffraction, high-speed atomic force microscopy and Raman Spectroscopy. The IAC staff use the equipment in the Facility to characterise a wide range of materials from steels and uranium to graphite, diamond and even paintings! The Facility works extensively with industry and academic researchers within the university and at partner institutions, providing cutting-edge data and analysis to answer fundamental materials challenges.

Cleanroom

The University of Bristol Cleanroom is available to external users interested in microfabrication and nanofabrication. We offer an initial consultation to determine if we are able to help you achieve your project goals and can proceed by running fabrication processes for customers or facilitating access to our Facility for employees of our partner organisations.