A new five-year agreement will give researchers across India access to the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source in Oxfordshire, while directing Indian investment towards the facility’s scientific instruments. The £3 million arrangement between the facility and the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), acting for India’s Department of Science and Technology, is due to begin on 1 November 2027.
The agreement moves the two countries’ research partnership into a second funded phase. It extends work across materials science into areas including biosciences and healthcare systems, and widens both the institutions involved and the range of UK-India research collaborations. The programme also supports the ISIS Endeavour instrument-development programme, with benefits intended for Indian researchers and the wider facility community.
What the facility offers researchers
ISIS is based at the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford. Its 35 neutron and muon instruments allow scientists to investigate materials at atomic scale. Neutron and muon techniques can reveal properties and behaviour that are difficult to observe through ordinary imaging, making the facility useful across a broad range of physical and life-science questions.
The work envisaged under the new arrangement ranges from materials for clean energy and storage to biosciences and healthcare systems. That breadth matters because the partnership is not simply a travel or access scheme: it links researcher use of the facility with investment in the tools used to carry out experiments. The instrument-development contribution is directed at maintaining and extending research capability, rather than funding a single named scientific result.
ISIS says it supports a national and international community of more than 3,000 scientists. Its work spans energy and environmental research, pharmaceuticals and healthcare, nanotechnology, materials engineering, catalysis, polymers and fundamental studies of materials. These are areas of activity at the facility, not guaranteed outcomes of the new agreement.
A second phase of a longer collaboration
The first ISIS-JNCASR partnership supported India-ISIS collaboration from 2017 to 2023. The facility says Indian participation grew substantially during that period, with users coming from across Indian states, and that the programme supported training and career development as well as research outputs. The new phase is intended to build on that base while bringing in more institutions and a wider range of research subjects.
UK Research and Innovation has described the wider ISIS relationship as dating back to 1983 and says India is now among the facility’s largest groups of beamtime users. It also states that more than 100 PhD theses will contain data generated through the programme. Beamtime is scheduled access to instruments, so its availability is a practical part of international research collaboration: scientists need access to specialised equipment, alongside the expertise and institutional links required to plan and interpret experiments.
For India, the arrangement provides a route for researchers to use a major UK facility and contributes to its continuing instrumentation programme. For ISIS and the broader user community, the stated benefit includes investment in instrument development and a larger network of scientific collaborators. The announcement does not specify an annual allocation of the £3 million or name individual research projects, so those should not be inferred from the overall commitment.
Part of a wider council agenda
The agreement was announced at the eighth UK-India Science and Innovation Council in New Delhi on 12 October. That meeting also covered separate cooperation plans, including a technology-translation partnership linking UK Catapults with Indian science and technology clusters. The governments also identified work on electricity-grid resilience, carbon capture and energy storage among wider areas for cooperation. Those initiatives sit alongside the ISIS agreement; they are not deliverables funded by it.
The facility agreement is a specific, funded commitment within a broader diplomatic and research relationship. Its practical test will be how access, instrument development, researcher training and new institutional partnerships are carried forward once the five-year phase begins in November 2027.
