The world of the small just got a lot bigger for ISU researchers.

Curiosity and anticipation were obvious on the faces of visitors as four ISU professors showed off the recently completed W.M. Keck Laboratory for High Throughput Atom-Scale Analysis in Sweeney Hall with a ceremony in Howe Hall on Wednesday. The white and brushed aluminum appointed lab room is the new home of a suite of instruments researchers hope will help create new materials and unlock the mysteries of matter on the atomic scale.

In a presentation before the open house, Theodore Okiishi, associate dean of engineering, hailed the significance of the lab and its centerpiece, the Local Electrode Atom Probe microscope, comparing his first microscope to the new instrument, which can locate and type atoms of a substance in three dimensions.

“Today, we should be pretty excited, because we are talking about a microscope with a magnification of well over a billion,” Okiishi said.

The $1.6 million lab was built largely through a grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation.

The proposal to bring the lab to Iowa State was written by four professors: Andrew Hillier, associate professor of chemical and biological engineering, Balaji Narasimhan, associate professor of chemical and biological engineering, Krishna Rajan, professor of materials science and engineering, and Sriram Sundararajan, assistant professor of mechanical engineering.

The departments hope to use the laboratory to study the properties and structure of new materials and compounds, helping to develop advanced alloys and chemical catalysts, among other applications.

ISU President Gregory Geoffroy said although advances in instrumentation are important to science, they are not the most crucial element.

“I was asked, ‘Why is this at Iowa State; Why would Iowa State receive this generous gift from the Keck Foundation to make this possible?'” Geoffroy said. “I think it’s because of the great research teams we have here at Iowa State, [and the] faculty, students, staff who wrote the proposal.”

Hillier said the new instruments are the most advanced yet to be installed at an academic institution and are important to the goals of several departments. “Our mission is to lead this research field, and I think we have the group of researchers here at Iowa State to do that,” Hillier said. “This lab puts [us] in that position as far as the facilities that we have.”