First of all, congratulations to you and your colleagues for receiving the 2025 King’s Award for Enterprise in Innovation. How does it feel to receive such a prestigious award?
Thank you. We were and are still absolutely overjoyed – it’s fantastic for Geoptic to be recommended by the UK Prime Minister for the award, and to be recognised by the King for our critical work supporting infrastructure renewal with muon imaging. As a UK business, there’s no more prestigious award so we’re all extremely humbled and pleased to receive it.
Recent awards (including the 2025 King’s Award for Enterprise in Innovation and the 2024 Institute of Physics Business Awards) have made the general public more aware of your success bridging the gap between academia and industry to contribute to solving global/local issues with muography. What are your views on public engagement and the responsibility of companies like Geoptic to actively promote public engagement?
Yes, in fact, with the other awards, it’s the recognition by the wider engineering and physics peer communities that was so pleasing to see.
I really hope the general public see the news. Given the pressures on early-stage companies, it’s extremely challenging to engage with the general public although it’s very important. When we can promote the subject to the general public, we’re heartened that our approach has a number of societal benefits to mention, which include: Muon imaging reduces the burden on Government transportation budgets through the reduced costs of structural assessments; we also have anecdotal evidence that it results in fewer railway workers will be ill or injured than when using alternative invasive techniques, as a result of our work; and longer term, sustaining aging infrastructure will contribute to fewer emissions and help with climate change too. As a result, the general public may not immediately recognize our work in engineering infrastructure assessment (for example) but we hope that they will certainly experience the broader benefits.
Founded in March 2020, (after initially starting as an academic group in 2018) Geoptic is a collaborative spin-out company from the University of Sheffield, the University of Durham, and St Mary’s University, Twickenham. How did you, along with the other founders, Professor Jon Gluyas, Dr Patrick Stowell, and Professor Lee Thompson (alphabetical order), first envision the mission of this company? What strategies did you and your team implement to begin to build commercial applications of muography and how have the research and technology goals of Geoptic evolved since then?
Our strategic approach is founded on Geoptic’s values of collaboration, innovation and impact. In the collaborative spirit, Geoptic was founded with a strong partnership in tunnel engineering, drawn from its earlier academic work, and this continues to be a strength now. The five years were not so easy initially due to various unforeseen events. For instance, Geoptic was founded in March 2020 just at the start of the pandemic. At the time, our muon survey team was standing next to a railway track performing preparatory measurements with our system, and about to go on to undertake a muon tunnel survey. At the same time, the then Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, made a TV address to put the UK into its first lockdown. Immediately, the evening’s track access was revoked, the survey project was stopped and the team travelled back home. Geoptic didn’t perform another muon survey for around 18 months, which is a very long time for a nascent spinout muon company.
At the time, it was clear that building resilience into the business was essential. Due to the pandemic restrictions at the time, the company pivoted to supporting a number of industrial and academic research partners, as computational projects could at least be performed. Geoptic were successful in this approach, surviving through the pandemic, forming a number of wider innovative partnerships with multinationals that have held to this day. This pivot later proved to also be a good decision as it gave the company opportunity to provide a wider suite of muon imaging instruments for other diagnostic challenges in other sectors.
Since the early days, the company has developed a broad approach of considering generic instrumentation that would address groups of applications. Geoptic’s ecosystem of instruments naturally came about as a result of this approach.
What are the advantages of being a spin out company and how did Geoptic leverage those strengths?
As a spin-out company, the main advantage is speed and the range of UK support available. Geoptic has a close-knit community of supporters, led by its three founding Universities, that provides helpful aspects from recruitment opportunities to introductions with investor and client networks. We also see founders working as academics, with their university allowing them to provide part of their time to the company, as another major benefit of being a spinout.
Geoptic has the capability to tackle several topics such as geotechnical, civil engineering, mining, energy, defense and geology projects.
What are some high-profile examples of your work?
One project, that we’re particularly proud of, is the world’s first muon tomographic image of stored CO2 on behalf of an international energy company, co-deploying with and validating muon imaging against conventional seismic imaging of CO2 subsurface plumes. Another influential example includes delivering an extended programme of work with the US Government in muon-enhanced positioning in a dense urban environment, inside a mine and underneath a frozen lake. Both have had further impact within their respective customer communities.
In the UK there are many underground railway tunnels, especially those from the Victorian period, that need to be assessed for potential safety risks. Could you describe those risks and how you and your team used muography to detect specific areas at risk of collapse? What were the advantages of Geoptics’s patented system in comparison to other established techniques?
There’s a fair bit to unpack here…
There are several safety risks associated with aging tunnel infrastructure and the UK isn’t alone in this, although perhaps suffers more than others. An extreme case is the potential collapse of concealed construction shafts that date back to the 1800s; the vertical shafts are up to 6m in diameter
and were used to send excavation teams and retrieve materials from the tunnelling work.
An instructive example of this is the Clifton Hall tunnel collapse in 1953 where, over the years, the local town had expanded and houses were built over the top of the tunnel. A period of extreme rainfall then destabilized the concealed shaft and led to the collapse of two houses which tragically killed five people. This sad incident is one that everyone involved in tunneling is working to avoid even in modern tunnels. The early detection of voids is very important as they provide a path for water to ingress, potentially carrying soil materials from above the tunnel into it. This process has been known to form larger voids, which then can migrate upwards towards the surface, or simply destablise the tunnel roof.
Void detection is key to supporting tunnel engineers, and we’ve worked on underground projects where the voids imaged are due many diverse origins, such as historic works, karsts, old mining works, grouting defects, overbreak from the original tunnelling process, and even disused World War 2 underground former military sites.
The main difference and benefit of muon imaging over other techniques is that others tend to be either challenging to use (such as GPR in tunnels) or invasive (such as drilling the tunnel roof). The invasive drilling option is still used though we see that usage seems to be decreasing as awareness of muon imaging grows.
What is the role of data analytics and simulations in muography experiments and surveys?
Data analytics and simulations play a huge and decisive role in muography. As measurement time is often very pressurised in many applications, there is a significant simulation and planning step in every project to make the best use of the time available on-site. For Geoptic, this involves building full digital terrain and subsurface geological models of every tunnel, and assimilating historical information such as from earlier modern surveys to copies of 19th century Engineering diaries, and other national data sources. It sometimes feels a little bit like being a historical engineering detective as we try to understand the tunnel construction and areas of concern.
This particular analysis approach allows us to evaluate the feasibility of every project we consider, well before setting foot on the site. It’s very influential for the future path of each project. If the simulations show that the target feature isn’t visible in a realistic length of time then the project doesn’t go ahead in its current form.
The analytics continues during the survey, where the performance of the detectors can be optimised from run-to-run as we acquire the data (by comparison to the predictions). Then, after the data is obtained, we then use 3D reconstruction methods to deliver a tomographic view to the customer.
Could you describe Geoptic’s international collaborations? Are there plans to continue to work with international governments, academia and businesses?
Yes, there are plans – we continue to have projects with UK and international government agencies, and collaborate with academia (especially internationally). Geoptic has many international collaborations that completely encompass the globe. In broad terms, Geoptic’s partners could be generally characterised as technical groups, with a deep technical specialism looking at exploiting the cosmic ray background to gain an advantage in their industry. Companies from industries such as tunnelling (as Geoptic’s core and patented area), closely related areas of mining, nuclear, energy, and defense are represented in our international collaborations.
What inspired you to dedicate your career to muography? What are the most exciting developments you see on the horizon for this new field?
I was lucky to have a good group at Oxford for my PhD study; the research area introduced me to using beamline muons for materials implantation studies, which led to a deeper fascination with muon interactions. Later on, whilst working for the UK’s MoD in the mid-2000s, I was given the opportunity to lead an applied muon team, supported by a good budget for my applied research programme. This all meant I could also support a number of emerging UK muography groups in the UK, and also led to collaborating with a number of US National Labs. The subject was just simply fascinating and rich in physics. Although the results were very tangible, it still felt very much like science fiction when I was describing the programme’s work to various Government departments.*
Muon imaging isn’t for all diagnostic applications and the required measurement time is often a challenging issue. There’s the obvious fast-moving developments in AI, which will continue to transform the area, and address this challenge. Our internal and other groups’ published studies have shown a significant detection speed-up when using trained classification approaches. We’d also see the muon imaging analysis and interpretation being underpinned by AI approaches, which would be a great enabler of wider non-expert adoption.
There are interesting non-technical developments too. The growing professionalisation of the industrial muon community is exciting to be a part of right now. At the moment, Geoptic has its staff using their muon imaging work to become Chartered Physicists and Engineers which is nice to see. There’s no reason why, in the near future, we couldn’t see the first Chartered Muographer to recognise and accredit the deeper and cross-disciplinary specialism of the area. As the community works towards new and further industrial acceptance, the clear identification of career paths in applied muon imaging would also encourage a strong pool of new talented people to bring their ideas, adding further fuel to this vibrant community.