To celebrate the launch of the Harwell Heritage Network, we sat down with co-founder Arthur Graf, to find out more about the project and the world of Heritage Science.
Dr Arthur Graf is an experimental officer with HarwellXPS, the national facility for X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, funded by ESPRC, and based at Research Complex at Harwell. He began working with HarwellXPS during a post-doc in Philip Davies’ lab at Cardiff University, following his PhD at the University of Sheffield. But it was as an undergraduate at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro that he first encountered XPS, as he explains:
I’ve always been involved in XPS from my undergrad, so as a career progression coming to Research Complex just made sense. As an experimental officer my day-to-day involves dealing with user samples and providing services across the country and abroad. That could be anyone who wants to use XPS or has questions about it, providing guidance and of course taking measurements for them. The samples they bring here could be anything, from medieval glasses to ancient fossils, it’s all really cool to analyse.
You have been a great advocate for XPS in terms of public engagement, how do you explain your work to public audiences?
One of the advantages of XPS is it involves a lot of basic concepts and names – adults and kids understand the words X-ray or radiation - photoelectron is linked to Einstein, so we can talk about who he was, how important he was. Then the last word is spectroscopy, we can talk about chemical analysis, why it’s important.
We like talking to kids and getting them involved, we were lucky we had funds to build some demos this year that were really popular – it’s extremely important for championing science.
The heritage work is very different to other popular uses of XPS, such as catalysis and energy, how does it fit in?
I think heritage is a future hot topic for our field, even if people haven’t quite realised it yet. They think it’s all about history, but I’ve learnt from the AHRC that heritage science is a multi-billion pound industry in the UK. It can have applications in engineering and construction. We were approached by Blenheim palace whose engineers had created a metal reconstruction of their building, and they wanted to find methods to prevent corrosion. Some institutions are looking at issues with moisture, so there’s biological problems with developing mould, bacteria etc.
Heritage science involves biology, chemistry, engineering, physics, everything. And XPS, analysing chemical changes at the surface, is perfect for all of these things. I think heritage science will be an important part of XPS in the future, in the last few months we have clocked over 100 hours of analysis time on heritage work, which is a sudden spike.
Where did your interest in heritage science come from?
When I was still at Cardiff I visited the Natural History Museum in London, and I really like Geology so I went to see the minerals just because they’re really colourful. I saw some placards that said Chemical structure unknown, and I thought – I know how to solve this problem. But I had no idea who to contact besides a general enquiries inbox.
So fast forward to working here, and we received a visit from Sophie Cummings from the AHRC. She was looking for facilities that could be part of the new Heritage programme RICHeS, [Research Infrastructure for Conservation and Heritage Science] which just officially launched on 1st October. So I told her my story and what we could do with XPS, and I just got more and more involved from there.
What kind of things can you discover with XPS for heritage science?
The first heritage sample I worked on was with some lovely people from Earth Sciences back in Cardiff. They had collected ancient clams in Fiji, diving very deep for them. They wanted to understand how they were formed, the process behind it, and we could tell them the salinity and the pH of the water when the clams formed, and so on.
So first of all, XPS, it’s non-destructive, which is obviously important for a piece of art or a fossil. And secondly, it’s reliable in terms of the qualitative and quantitative information you can get. Finally, and unlike most other techniques, XPS is surface sensitive, so we can analyse the utmost top layers of materials where chemistry usually happens, for example degradation or corrosion.
More recently I’ve been analysing some medieval glasses that came to us from English Heritage in London. They wanted to know was there any original glass left? So we analysed the surface to observe any chemical changes and analyse different layers to see deep into the sample to find any of the remaining glass.
How did this work begin to grow into a wider network across campus?
It started with my colleague Mark who introduced me to Sara who was also working on heritage science at Research Complex, with the Central Laser Facility. Sara led me to Antonella at ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, who came up with the idea for the Harwell Heritage Network. Together we’ve pushed the project forward.
Arthur and Dr Antonella Scherillo have built up the network to include Diamond Light Source and industry groups like Finden, alongside HarwellXPS, ISIS, and CLF. Supporting the AHRC RICHeS programme, they offer a wellspring of expertise in many different imaging and characterisation techniques, as well as advice on accessing the facilities. Their first official meeting takes place on Wednesday 6th November, at Research Complex. Arthur explains the added value of the network:
A lot of people working in heritage might not understand advanced characterisation tools from the perspective of chemistry, biology, physics. So they might have a basic query, like - I have a sample and I want to understand the morphology and or chemical structure of it - but they have no idea where to start.
So the goal of the network will be:
1 – To provide information to the community by responding to specific scientific queries.
2 – Bridge the gap between the facilities here and the RICHeS programme so that samples can be analysed here for free.
3 – Host events and workshops to bring the scientific and heritage community here, so any museum or historical building or heritage institution who wants to understand what we do and the benefits of the facilities here can come and find out.
Discover more about the AHRC RICHeS programme here. The Harwell Heritage Network will share updates through the RICHeS website.
