Scientists at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory have installed a new £4m super microscope, pictured, which will help them work on improving the performance of mobile phone batteries and understand more about pharmaceutical drugs.

Polaris, which has taken five years to design and build, is a giant camera for imaging the atomic world using beams of neutrons.

It can measure items that are nanometres in size – a million times smaller than a speck of dust.

The microscope, which is the size of four shipping containers, was lowered into the laboratory by a 30-tonne crane on Friday.