The European Spallation Source And Future Opportunities For Materials Science
- PDF / 10,898,754 Bytes
- 12 Pages / 612 x 792 pts (letter) Page_size
- 44 Downloads / 261 Views
The European Spallation Source And Future Opportunities For Materials Science Oliver Kirstein1,2 1 2
European Spallation Source, Visiting address: Tunavägen 24, 22363 Lund, Sweden School of Engineering, The University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW 2308, Australia
ABSTRACT The European Spallation Source is Europe’s next generation high-power neutron source utilising a linear accelerator and a rotating tungsten target to produce neutrons that will be used for fundamental research and industrial applications. The facility is co-hosted by the states of Denmark and Sweden, and while the main site will be placed in Lund, Sweden, the Data Management and Software Centre will be located in Copenhagen, Denmark. The facility will cover a broad range of scientific applications in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, or life sciences. A focus will also be materials science and engineering, and dedicated instruments will gradually become available to the user community once neutrons will be produced neutrons from 2019 onwards. INTRODUCTION The European Spallation Source (ESS) will be a major user facility at which researchers from academia and industry will investigate scientific questions using neutron beams, which provide insights about the molecular building blocks of matter not available by other means. The use of proton-driven neutron sources, generated by cyclotrons, synchrotrons, or linear accelerators, was beginning to be explored in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Pioneering work at Argonne National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory in the USA and in Tsukuba in Japan indicated that pulsed proton sources held out a significant technological advantage over the most intense research reactors. This was because the spallation reaction employed in proton machines generates significantly less heat per useful neutron than does a fission reactor, which culminated with the commissioning of the high flux reactor at the Institute Laue-Langevin (ILL) which retained a scientific lead even 40 years after the reactor became critical. In addition, the generation of neutrons in pulses provides peak brightnesses that far exceed those available from reactors, Figure 1. In the late 1970s, construction began on Europe’s first proton spallation source, ISIS, which was built close to Oxford, UK, and produced a first beam in 1984. Despite having a design power of only 180 kW, ISIS demonstrated that world-class science could be carried out very effectively on such sources. ISIS was the birthplace of many new instrument concepts, some of which had been prototyped on other neutron sources. ISIS also provided a degree of support to the user community that surpassed the contemporary accepted relationship between the central facility and its user community, and the success of ISIS culminated in a new second target station (TS-II, first neutrons in December 2007) including many new and integrated state-of-the art neutron scattering instruments.
Figure 1. Development of neutron sources world-wide, pulsed and steady-state, since the
Data Loading...
