Twenty years ago, on a quiet Sunday in March 2006, a researcher in Glasgow fired a single beam of electrons at a target the width of a fraction of a human hair. It was the first test run of a new machine — and the start of one of Scotland's most remarkable, and least-known, technology success stories.

The University of Glasgow's James Watt Nanofabrication Centre is celebrating its 20th anniversary, and the milestone is a chance to shine a light on work that touches far more lives than most people realise.

What is nanofabrication, anyway?

Nanofabrication is, put simply, the art of building things that are almost unimaginably small. The Centre's specialists use focused beams of electrons to etch intricate patterns just a fraction of a micron across — far too tiny to see with the naked eye.

Those patterns become the building blocks of advanced electronic and light-based devices: the kind of components hidden inside the phone in your pocket and the data centres that keep the internet running.

The Centre is home to a £35 million suite of equipment housed in a 1,200-square-metre cleanroom, where staff in protective suits carry out more than 100 electron-beam jobs every week.

From a Glasgow lab to the world's data centres

According to the University of Glasgow, the Centre's biggest impact has come from making custom semiconductor lasers — the components that carry information as pulses of light through fibre-optic cables.

Working with the University's commercial arm, Kelvin Nanotechnology, the Centre helped the firm Sivers Semiconductors produce millions of these lasers. The work brought faster broadband and television to consumers around the globe.

Andrew McKee, Sivers' chief technology officer, said the company has now supplied 45 million advanced lasers for uses including AI data centres, LIDAR and consumer sensing. "That's a remarkable achievement for a Scottish company, and part of the credit for that belongs to the JWNC," he said.

Working with the Glasgow team, he added, accelerated the company's route to market by around 18 months — a head start that proved "crucial in winning business".

Volcanoes, space stations and the world's smallest coin

The Centre's reach goes well beyond the internet. Devices made in Glasgow have monitored volcanic activity on Mount Etna and measured air quality aboard the International Space Station.

Its researchers have set a string of world records, including the world's smallest diamond transistor and, in 2012, the world's smallest diamond coin.

There is a human legacy, too. More than 200 postgraduate students train at the Centre each year, with former students now working at companies including Google, Microsoft and BAE Systems.

Looking ahead

Professor Martin Weides, the Centre's director, said the University has been "at the cutting edge of nanofabrication over six decades". The Centre, he added, has "helped take research out of the lab and into commercial use".

Now its leaders are planning something bigger. A proposal is under development for a new Critical Technologies Nanofabrication Facility, designed to help British companies take new technologies from the lab to the market faster — and to reduce reliance on overseas manufacturing.

Evelyn Toma, the Centre's director of strategy, said the plans for the next phase "are about scale and impact", with an ambition to train "the people who will build the next generation of devices here in the UK".

Not bad for a story that began with a single electron, fired on a Sunday in Glasgow.