Award Recipients

Oxford Instruments was founded as the first commercial spinout from Oxford University in 1959, and has grown to become a leading global provider of high technology products and services to the world’s leading companies and scientific research communities. Its products image, analyse, control and manipulate materials down to the atomic and molecular level.

The team at Oxford Instruments is extremely proud to receive the King’s Award for Enterprise for its Symmetry Detector. Symmetry was created to enable a deeper understanding of a wide range of materials, analysing their properties with incredible precision. With its ability to operate at the nanoscale – that is, to billionths of a metre, or 1000 times smaller than a human hair – Symmetry is used in a multitude of applications across the world.

Developed at Oxford Instruments’ materials analysis base in High Wycombe, Symmetry uses a technique called electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) to identify tiny flaws or weaknesses in the structure of materials. This helps researchers understand how these faults formed and how they can be addressed. Symmetry radically increased the speed with which such in-depth analyses can be performed, resulting in the technique being much more widely adopted.

With its ability to capture samples 12 times faster than its predecessors, with greater sensitivity and at much higher resolution, Symmetry has made a niche technology more widely accessible with applications across a variety of sectors and industries. This opens up vast industrial and scientific opportunities, from developing far more robust and long-lasting batteries and semiconductors, to developing stronger aircraft turbine blades. It has even been used to analyse meteorites to help understand how extra-terrestrial rock formed.

Richard Tyson, CEO, says: “To receive a King’s Award for Enterprise is fantastic recognition for our brilliant team in High Wycombe who have developed this remarkable step-change in technology. Symmetry is now allowing quicker, sharper analysis by even more researchers across the world, paving the way for further advances in a wide range of exciting applications.”