Question: what is the biggest miscroscope you run ?

Ian Hands-Portman answered on 13 Mar 2014:

It’s a monster called the 2010F – which won’t mean a lot to you. It something called a Field Emission Gun ( FEG ) to generate our beam and we use it because it makes sharper images than anything else, it’s a pain in the bum because it should never, ever be turned off – so we need fancy power supplies to stop that happening. If it does go off I have to babysit it for four hours to turn it on again – if it won’t come back on it costs us 35 grand to replace it.

The FEG itself is about a metre and a quarter high and it sits on top of a column – the main microscope bit that’s maybe two and half metres high and half a metre wide. Then the control panel is about a metre and a half either side of that at desk height. at the back of the room, the transformer to make the 200,000 volts we need is roughly the size of a small car.

It weighs about two tonnes – most of that is lead shielding to stop it frying us with radiation and cooling pipes because all that electrical stuff makes a lot of heat.

The smaller something is, the larger the equipment you need to look at it, sometimes I wonder if the Universe is having a laugh at our expense.