Minutes of Australian Neutron Beam Users Group (ANBUG) Annual General Meeting

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Minutes of Australian Neutron Beam Users Group (ANBUG) Annual General Meeting

Tuesday 2nd December, 2008 at 1610

AGENDA

Presidents report (Craig Buckley)

An overview of the 2008 year was given. At the end of the year we had ~353 members, with a diverse range of scientific interest and country of origin. There were several highlights:

1. OPAL returning to power
2. Awarding of ARPANSA operating licences to 6 of the instruments.
3. The 2nd beamtime round, which was well subscribed to and whose experiments will be run next year. ANBUG has a representative on PAC, which distributes beamtime.
4. 5 year LIEF grant for ISIS ($1 000 000), which gives Australian researchers access to specialised instruments. This was successfully obtained by a consortium of Universities, AINSE and ANSTO.
5. The formation of the Asia-Oceania Neutron Scattering Association (AONSA) with ANBUG as a founding member.

Trevor Finlayson proposed that ANBUG formally acknowledge Dennis Mathers (AINSE) role in the preparation of the successful LIEF grant for ISIS access.

Financial Report (Brendan Kennedy)

ANBUG has ~$80 000 invested in term deposit. The interest earned by this income is intended to be used as a grant to fund one or two postgraduate students to attend ICNS

OPAL Update (Rob Robinson)

The Head of the Bragg Institute gave an overview of what had happened to the neutron beam instruments over the year. Most importantly OPAL came back to power in July, which enabled the instruments to start working again, and to start performing science. (Please see addendum for full highlights).

Opal sample environmentupdate (Scott Olsen)

Scott gave an overview of the sample environments that have been bought and commissioning over the past year. This include the loadframe, Paris-Edinburgh Cell, gas loading cell, robotic sample changer, etc.

Neutron Scattering Decadal Plan (Herma Buttner)

This will be completed by Aug ’09. This will outline the capabilities and future plans for neutron scattering science at OPAL.

Asia-Oceania Neutron Scattering Association - AONSA (Brendan Kennedy)

This was officially formed at the IUCR meeting in Osaka. The first president is Prof. Mahn-Won Kim (Korea) with Prof. John White (Australia) as vice-president. Our other representative on the committee is Dr. Rob Robinson.

One of the first acts of AONSA was to hold a neutron school in Korea. There were 41 attendees in total, with 20 non Korean students. Prof. Greg Warr and Prof. Mike James taught at the school.

2008AINSE/ANBUG Neutron Scattering School (Herma Buttner)

The neutron school was extremely successful, with a total of 23 students attending. All of the participants were able to perform real experiments on the instruments, which aided greatly their understanding. The participants particularly enjoyed the social activities that were organized alongside the school. The next neutron school is scheduled for August 2009.

2009/2010 ARC LIEF applications involving the Bragg Institute (Gordon Kearley)

A consortium consisting of Universities, AINSE and ANSTO were successful in a LIEF grant for the construction of a Beryllium filter on TAIPAN. This has a cost of ~$1million and will be useful as a tool for examining quick spectroscopic properties of materials.

Status of AMRFP Funding for 2009 – 2010 (Jamie Schulz)

This fund provides money to allow researchers to access to major facilities overseas. DIISR said earlier in the year that there would be no money for the FY2009, with no guarantee for money in the FY2010. After a concerted response by ANBUG and other user communities, who wrote letters to DIISR, they have now agreed to reconsider their position and will let us know in the near future what will happen.

Jamie Schulz also explained that the focus of AMRFP will be to fund those experiments that would not be possible on Australian instruments (at either the synchrotron, or at OPAL).

ANBUG Awards (Craig Buckley)

The 2007 awards were handed to Erich Kisi (Newcastle) and Brian O’Connor (Curtin).

The 2008 award for Lifetime Contribution to Neutron Science was awarded to Margaret Elcombe, who has given over 40 years of service to the Australian neutron scattering community.

AINSE/ANBUG Neutron Scattering Symposium – December 2009?

It is intended to run again in 2009, with the organisers being finalised in early 2009. This promises to be a successful symposium as the OPAL instruments will be producing good data by then.

ANSTO user facilities

Herma Buttner canvassed opinions and asked for feedback on several aspects of user facilities at OPAL. This included:

• Motel and cafeteria are now run by different operators, consequently there is no catering at weekends. (Better food was also hoped for)
• Common room facilities are needed at the motel (conversion of a flat was suggested), to give users a space to relax in.
• Transport. Users shouldn’t have to rent a car, as many of our users will be under 25, etc. A commitment was made by the ANSTO CEO a while back to have two ANSTO pool cars provided for users. ANBUG should write to the CEO enquiring whether this has been actioned.

Herma reiterated that user opinion is valuable; it was suggested that ANBUG collate opinion, with a view to writing a letter to ANSTO.

New ANBUG committee

Elections for the new ANBUG committee were made in November/December. This committee takes over in the new year. The meeting thanked the outgoing committee for all their hard work and effort. The incoming committee was congratulated.

President:Brendan Kennedy

VP:Chris Ling

Past PresidentCraig Buckley

General Members:

Duncan McGillivray

Annemieke Mulders

James Hester

Andrew Nelson

Darren Goossens

Any Other Business

A vote of thanks was given to the organisers of AANSS2007, specifically Daniel Riley, Trevor Finlayson, Dennis Mather and Rhiannon Still.

Next General Meeting (provisional date).

The next meeting will be held at AANSS2008.

Addendum

2008 highlights for Bragg/OPAL

2008 has been an extremely busy year for scientists, engineers and technicians working at the Bragg Institute, Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO). The OPAL reactor, which had been shutdown for 10 months, came back to full power in May. During the shutdown the majority of instrument installation was completed, so when the shutters reopened hot commissioning on the initial seven instruments resumed in earnest, with neutron beams travelling into Quokka (SANS) and Taipan (tThree- Aaxis Spectrometerspectrometer) for the first time. Both Echidna and Wombat (powder diffractometers), Koala (Laue diffractometer) and Kowari (residual stress instrument) acquired their operating licences from the nuclear regulator soon after, enabling friendly user experiments to resume. Licences for Quokka and Platypus (reflectometer) followed in November.

Return to power allowed a series of firsts – the first strain scan and pole figure on Kowari, the first structurally refineable pattern on Koala, the first SANS pattern from Quokka, amongst others. In fact some of the earliest users were students at the 2nd ANSTO/AINSE Neutron School, held in July, who were all doing their first neutron experiments. As befitting the Australian location of the instruments the SANS pattern came from Opal, Australia's gemstone, whilst Koala measured an NaCl crystal, which was one of the first materials studied by the Australian Nobel Prize winnersscientists William and Lawrence Bragg.

After licensing, Wombat and Echidna were able to start performing experiments approved in the first user proposal round. Some of the first science performedexperiments on Wombat and Echidna has been examining real-time phase changes in alloys, negative-thermal expansion materials and incommensurate magnetic structures. Important incremental improvements continue to be made to both instruments, most notably the construction of a vacuum sample chamber that significantly reduces collection times.

Both Kowari and Koala are currently performing friendly user experiments. However, Koala has already been used to study behaviour in the single crystal multiferroic, Hexaferrite.

Characterisation of Quokka and Platypus has been continuing, with a good beam intensity (~3×107at 5Å) being measured at the Quokka sample position and reflectivities of around 1×10-7being seen on Platypus (for a 20 × 30mm2sample). The cold source has been operating in a stable and consistent manner over this period.

Taipan is at the hot commissioning stage with measurement of a first phonon expected in January 2009.

Development on sample environments continued, with the notable arrival of the Instron 100kN load frame for Kowari, the sample changer robot for powder diffraction, in-situ reaction chamber, electrical impedance spectrometer and the rapid heat-quench cell for SANS. The latter was developed in house and is designed to heat and cool samples at a rate of 20deg/sec. The design was a runner up in the Innovations and Inventions category in the Engineering Excellence awards.

The second proposal round closed in October, for beam time between January March and June September 2009, with demand running at 1x up to 3 timesx the number of available days. Five instruments were included in the call: Echidna, Wombat, Koala, Kowari and Platypus. The latter three instruments are in the user program for the first time. The next call is anticipated for January-at the beginning of February 2009 for time on Quokka and the National Deuteration Facility.

The X-ray scattering instruments (X-ray reflectometer and Bruker NanoStar pinhole SAXS) continue to be workhorses in science and in complementing neutron measurements; they and have recently been augmented by the installation of a HECUS point focus SAXS. X-ray time can be awarded in conjunction with neutron beam time, which is often useful as an extra contrast measurement.

However, the future has not been forgotten. The second round of instruments, Sika (cold three-axis spectrometer, being built by the National Science Council of Taiwan) and Pelican (cold neutron time-of-flight spectrometer), are well into the design and procurement phase. An ultra small- angle neutron scattering instrument – Kookaburra is currently at the conceptual stage. Two possible instrument options have been identified for Kookaburra: the classical crystal USANS and the newer spin-echo (SESANS) technique.

Additional capabilities are also being planned for the existing instruments. A joint consortium of universities, the Australian Institute of Nuclear Science and Engineering (AINSE) and ANSTO succeeded in winning a ~$1million grant for a beryllium-filter option for the secondary spectrometer of Taipan, which will be directed at molecular spectroscopy. Funding has also been secured for a procurementprocurement and commissioning of a3He polarisation system, and implementation of polarisers/analysers at the instrument level. The polarisation system will greatly enhance magnetism studies on Platypus, Quokka, Wombat, Sika and Pelican to start with, and is anticipated to be usable in July 2011.

So the future of neutron scattering is bright in Australia.

Andrew Nelson,

Bragg Institute, ANSTO