Dr Perez-Martinez is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the LCN, and leads work towards the development of nanomanufacturing technologies based on new sources of ions from ionic liquids.
Ionic liquids are room temperature molten salts, or mixtures of cations or anions that are liquid at room temperature with no intervening solvent. The cations are usually large organic molecules, while the anions may be complex organic or simple inorganic ions. Our work is based on Ionic Liquid Ion Sources (ILIS), which are devices that produce ion beams by means of field evaporation from ionic liquids.
ILIS give the possibility of creating ion beams with many different chemistries, thanks to the variety of ionic liquids available. ILIS can be useful in material treatment applications, for example, the ion beam can have reactive species for accelerated etching of a target substrate.
The research areas include characterisation of the interaction of different ionic liquids with a variety of target substrates, exploring the use of ILIS arrays for high throughput nanomachining, ionic liquid deposition, and developing a focused ion beam system based on ILIS.