ENSA

With close of research reactors, landscape is shifting for Europe’s world-leading neutron science community

The ENSA delegates have gathered in Sorbonne University, Paris for the election of the new Chair of ENSA.

We are very proud 🙂 to announce that prof. Henrik Rønnow is elected as our new Chair! Henrik has been very actively involved in the business of ENSA of the last years and we look forward to work with him even more intensely in the coming years.

Henrik takes over the Chair position from prof. Christiane Alba-Simionesco, who has paved the way for ENSA to be consortium member of the EU-funded Brightness2 project. The increased visibility of ENSA’s role representing the (enormous) European user community is largely a legacy of Christiane Alba-Simionesco.

We are very grateful 🙂 to her for realizing this strengthening of ENSA’s position and we look forward to work with Henrik to taking it to the next level in the coming years!

The planned closure of the Orphee reactor at Laboratoire Leon Brillouin in Saclay, Paris since a few days means the loss of a great piece of research infrastructure in neutron scattering science. The expertise of the staff involved is of course maintained and applied but training future neutron scientists cannot be done anymore at this bright neutron source.

LLB will continue its role as an interdisciplinary center for the use of neutrons, assembling all instrumental, methodological and scientific expertise for the successful use of the ESS and other major sources, serving as a resource in neutron based science for the whole community. This can be done in a variety of ways. LLB has articulated, and commenced implementation of, a plan that maintains its scientific and technological expertise, provides for access to other neutron facilities (via CRG’s) in the short term, fulfills the French participation in ESS (instruments), and would make a national source (the SONATE project) operating in user mode a reality by 2025, keeping in mind that any sustainable long-term scenario clearly requires access to the flagship facility ESS as well as the operation of a national user facility.

A musical celebration of the Ultra Cold Neutron in Nature by Hartmut Abele and co-workers:

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An impression of the Saint Petersburg ECNS 2019 conference: the marvelous conference venue MANEGE CENTRAL EXHIBITION HALL in the center of St Petersburg, next to the St. Isaac Cathedral; the opening session on Sunday afternoon by the officials; the 25th celebration of ENSA, celebrated with the user community and a beautiful cake and concert, which were generously offered by the local ECNS organisers: many thanks!

The winner of the inaugural 2019 ENSA Neutron Instrumentation and Innovation Award is Markus Appel.

“For ground-breaking advances of the neutron back-scattering technique leading to extended dynamic range, higher resolution and better signal-to-noise on the IN16B spectrometer at ILL”.

Markus Appel, currently a staff scientist at ILL, has since his PhD from TU Darmstadt devoted his talents to implementing innovative improvements to the neutron backscattering technique. These span from conceptual changes such as moving from monochromator to time-of-flight, over clever rephrasing of choppers to achieve ultra-low background, to the material and mechanical challenge of implementing GaAs analyzers. Together these improvements to the IN16B spectrometer at ILL has enabled a wide range of exciting science by a large number of user groups – perfectly embellishing the spirit of the Neutron Instrumentation and Innovation Award. More information about the award, sponsored by Mirrotron, can be found here (https://ensa.tudelft.nl/awards/).

Kell has been a world leader in the application of small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) to soft matter systems, in particular, polymers for three decades. He has contributed numerous fundamental advances to our understanding of the thermodynamics and dynamics of soft materials along with developing innovative in-situ techniques.

Scientifically his work on Polymer I Block copolymer melts was of fundamental importance: Key results include: (i) unraveling the consequences of fluctuation effects in diblock copolymers; (ii) discovery of the Gyroid phase; (iii) demonstration of the role of dynamic shearing in ordered block copolymers using in-situ devices; he was the first to implement a rheometer on a SANS beam line and became more or less synonymous with the use of in situ large amplitude oscillatory shear at SANS that produced numerous spectacular results; (iv) unification of the diblock copolymer phase diagram, where he identified 4 ordered structures that turned out to be universal for diblock copolymer systems; (v) discovery of polymeric bicontinuous microemulsions and (vi) elucidating  the physical solution properties of the Pluronics, an amphiphilic triblock copolymer that on the one hand is an important model system for the understanding of the physics and phase behavior of self-assembling systems and on the other hand has numerous applications as nonionic surface­ active agent in industrial applications, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, drug delivery, and bioprocessing.

Kell has represented the Danish neutron community internationally as the chair of the Danish user organization DANSKK for more than two decades and correspondingly has been the Danish ENSA delegate for almost the same amount of time. Also, as a co-founder of ESS-Scandinavia and chairman of the ESS-Scandinavia Science Committee he has been deeply involved in the long, hard struggle to ensure the building of the European Spallation Source.

* ENSA thanks SwissNeutronics for sponsoring this prize

The previous ENSA website has been blocked for some time now, due to technical problems. We are constructing a new site at this moment. Please bear with us.

The upcoming European Conference for Neutron Scattering will be held in the beautiful city of Saint Petersburg from 30 June until 05 July 2019.

The 8th International Meeting of the Union for Compact Acceleration-driven Neutron Sources will be held in Paris from July 8-11 2019. For the programme see https://ucans8.sciencesconf.org/