European Spallation Source (ESS) project a £1.3billion European project to build the world's most advanced and powerful neutron facility for the study of materials at the atomic level - in other words to show where atoms are and what atoms do in materials of scientific and technological importance.
Bob Cywinski, the Professor and Dean of Applied Sciences at the University and his colleagues have embarked on calculations and computer simulations that have the potential to be of enormous global significance. The result might be nuclear power stations that could be turned on and off like a light bulb and will not create potentially dangerous by-products.
Bob Cywinski's basic area of study is the way that sub-atomic particles, especially neutrons, can be used to probe deep inside materials in order to analyse their structure. But first the neutrons have to be produced -- either by nuclear reactor or by a process called spallation, which uses acceleration technology to aim a high energy beam of protons at a heavy metal target from which the neutrons are chipped -- "spallation" is derived from an ancient Anglo Saxon word meaning to take chips from an object.