ISIS is committed to staying at the forefront of global research by continuously upgrading its world-class neutron and muon instruments. The Endeavour Programme is a bold step forward, introducing four cutting-edge instruments and five major upgrades over the next decade, ensuring that ISIS remains a global leader in neutron and muon science.
Endeavour will drive groundbreaking advancements in three crucial areas: materials of the future, clean growth, and life sciences—directly supporting key government goals like Net Zero, the circular economy, hydrogen energy, and healthcare. With its unique capabilities, Endeavour will revolutionise the development of materials for energy storage, carbon capture, advanced reactors, renewable energy, drug delivery, vaccine production, and chemical industry catalysts.
See our interactive overview of Endeavour here, or by clicking the image on the right, and keep up to date with the progress of the programme on our
Endeavour Updates page.
The new Endeavour instruments
Mushroom – an entirely novel concept that will be transformative for inelastic neutron scattering. Mushroom will enable use of much smaller samples, more detailed parametric studies, and new types of sample environment and in-situ equipment, in areas such as thin magnetic films, thermo-electrics, magneto-resistive materials, ionic conductors and battery materials.
> More on Mushroom
Wish-II – a new instrument and polarisation upgrade for WISH. The project is twofold: building a new single crystal (optimised for small crystals) and epitaxial thin film (down to 30nm) cold neutron diffractometer WISH-II with a large continuous detector coverage (approx. 2.5π) and an upgrade to the existing WISH beamline to implement polarized neutron measurement capability, which together promise transformative breakthroughs in Advanced Manufacturing, Materials of the Future and Clean Growth.
> More on Wish-II
eMAP – a new diffractometer for neutron diffraction studies of real‐world engineering components, with applications including 3D residual stress mapping, high spatial resolution, large and complex shaped components, near-to-surface investigations, process measurement, in-situ loading and special environments. Together with complementary facilities on ENGIN-X and IMAT, e-MAP will form a suite of world-leading instrumentation at ISIS, using advanced neutron characterisation techniques to address a diverse range of technologically relevant problems.
> More on e-Map
LMX – a new single crystal diffractometer, optimised for studies of large molecule systems, with applications across a range of research areas in the fields of structural biology, macromolecular chemistry and functional materials. This includes many topical research areas, such as supramolecular chemistry, hybrid organic-inorganic complexes, framework materials, organometallic chemistry and studies of the active sites in biomolecular systems.
> More on LMX
Endeavour - Significant upgrades
HRPD-X – a major upgrade to the current HRPD instrument at ISIS, to expand its user base into new research areas and maintain its position as a world-leading facility for high resolution powder diffraction using neutrons. Research areas include materials for gas separation, encapsulation and purification, including greenhouse gas management or hydrogen economy.
> More on HRPD-X
SuperMuSR – The next generation of muon spectroscopy instrument with a transformational increase in counting rate and time resolution, creating a unique instrument world-wide. SuperMuSR will deliver enhanced capacity and capability relevant to a wide range of studies including Faraday Battery Challenge projects to one of the most oversubscribed ISIS instruments.
> More on SuperMuSR
Tosca+ – an order of magnitude more flux through development of the Tosca secondary spectrometer for vibrational spectroscopy studies in catalysis and energy materials, enabling the instrument to remain globally competitive.
> More on Tosca+
Sandals-II – a diffractometer for chemical engineering in amorphous and liquid samples providing information on multi-component samples used in catalysis, drug release, hydrogen storage, oil industry systems and polymers.
> More on Sandals-II
Osiris+ – a high-resolution spectrometer and diffractometer for studies of atomic and molecular-level motions. This upgrade will enable studies in catalysis and energy materials, enhancing exiting industrial work.
> More on Osiris+
User meetings
In July 2021 a series of user meetings was held to present and discuss the Endeavour Programme projects. Talks describing each project were given by members of the user community - you can see recordings of these talks on the Endeavour Programme User Meetings web page.
