USER PROGRAM
The user program, involving NCNR staff and the user community of academic, industrial, and government laboratory researchers, continues to be successful. The success is, in part, manifested in the large number of high-impact, high-quality scientific publications in diverse technical areas that include condensed-matter physics, materials processing and manufacturing, biology, pharmacy, and geology. Many publications are collaborative, reflective of important contributions from NCNR staff. Such contributions may include input from NCNR staff to users before they submit proposals for beam time. NCNR staff may at times perform proof-of-concept, or feasibility, experiments to ensure the viability of proposed experiments. Additionally, NCNR staff may develop data analysis tools or assist with the analysis of the neutron-scattering data. NCNR staff members have also assisted in the preparation of scientific manuscripts and with the response to referee queries.
The process used to evaluate proposals for neutron experiments continues to be fair and ensures that high-quality proposals are successful. Each proposal is read by three to five reviewers. The reviews are evaluated by the beam time allocation committee (BTAC) before the final decision is reached; this ensures fairness to the authors and that the proposals that are allocated beam time are of high quality. Requests for time to perform experiments exceed available time. Eventually, however, meritorious proposals are allocated beam time.
NCNR management has benefited from this important relationship with the user community. Workshops involving members of the user community have proven to be an effective source of feedback and guidance regarding appropriate investments in new instruments, instrument upgrades, and related facilities necessary to ensure that the research remains at the cutting edge of the field.
Overall, this is a successful program.
EDUCATION AND OUTREACH
Educational activities at the NCNR are an important component of the overall program. The most notable component is the highly oversubscribed summer school, sponsored by CHRNS, for graduate students and young scientists. Two such summer schools are offered in alternate years. These focus on neutron spectroscopy and on neutron reflectometry and SANS, respectively, and are more focused than the complementary National School on Neutron and X-ray Scattering offered each year by Argonne National Laboratory and ORNL. The CHRNS summer school features significant hands-on time with the instrumentation and are widely regarded as a success. The CHRNS summer school typically serves 35 graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and junior faculty each year. About 75 percent of attendees come back as users, so this activity is very important for the future of the neutron-scattering community.
Other commendable activities include a summer internship for a high school teacher (to be expanded in the future), numerous tours for school groups, and participation in the NIST Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF). Educational programs are largely supported by NSF.
Outreach activities by NCNR staff include visits to universities and participation in national and international conferences. Periodic workshops organized by the NCNR are an important component of planning for future instrument development at NCNR.
CENTER FOR HIGH RESOLUTION NEUTRON SCATTERING
The partnership between the NCNR and the NSF, CHRNS, has been reestablished. A renewal proposal was funded by NSF, enabling the partnership to continue. This has been a successful center, with more than 500 publications citing support from CHRNS and more than 100 doctoral students who received partial support for their graduate research in the past 5 years. Many of these students have subsequently joined the faculties of universities, and some have won important awards for young researchers, including awards from the American Physical Society, the American Chemical Society, the Society of Rheology, and the Canadian Association of Physicists. Numerous high school students, undergraduates, and high school teachers have benefited from programs supported by CHRNS.
This newly reestablished CHRNS will support a set of instruments with unprecedented capabilities: the 30 m SANS instrument; ultra-SANS, High Flux Backscattering Spectrometers (HFBS), NSE, MACS, vSANS, and the CANDOR reflectometer. Both CANDOR and vSANS will become available in the next few years. CANDOR, which will be available in 2017, will enable data acquisition at a higher rate than any other such instrument currently available in the world. Currently, MACS has the highest monochromatic cold-neutron intensity in the world, which enables the study of magnetic properties of materials with a very large volume of S(Q,ω). The vSANS instrument will be the first such instrument in the United States to operate in a large range of wavelengths, enabling a study of the morphology of materials at broader length scales. The capabilities of the newly planned NSE spectrometer are among the best in the world.
This reestablished collaboration will enable an unprecedented study of the structure and dynamics of hard and soft matter, including lipid bilayer fluctuations, the morphology of polymer-based systems, magnetism, superconductivity, and the storage of methane and batteries. NCNR staff are to be commended for the plans that they have established for instrument upgrades and their accomplishments to date. Their plans for CANDOR and vSANS are appropriate.
nSOFT
The nSOFT collaboration between the NIST and U.S. industry, to use neutron-based techniques to investigate the properties of soft materials relevant to technological applications, is proving to be a viable program, of value to industry and with a promising future, supporting the mission of NIST. In nSOFT, researchers from U.S. companies work collaboratively with NIST to address problems of technological interest. Members of NIST collaborate with industrial researchers to identify appropriate neutron experiments and other complementary techniques and tools at NIST to address problems. Member companies pay $25,000 per year for this opportunity.
The program has progressed well during the past 2 years, and it now includes six companies. The projects are innovative and responsible for advances in experimental procedures, such as new sample environment capabilities and data analysis procedures. Examples of projects include the processing of paints, oil recovery, manufacturing, and fuel cells. Capabilities that have been developed as a result of the nSOFT collaborations have benefited academic researchers.
There has been a change in the original plans for nSOFT. The initial goal was to attract as many companies as possible to become members of nSOFT. NIST’s new goal is to identify companies that would specifically benefit from this collaboration and to work closely with them on wider-range problems, in greater detail, to achieve higher impact.
