High Brilliance Neutron Source Workshop

Oct. 27-28 2015, Unkel, Germany

Date: 03/11/2015
Source: Forschungszentrum Jülich, JCNS
Text: Thomas Gutberlet, JCNS

An international workshop with more than 30 researchers was organized by the Jülich Centre for Neutron Science on Oct. 27-28, 2015 to discuss current and future options for compact accelerator driven high brilliance neutron sources to serve the international scientific community. The workshop reflected the current ongoing concentration of research with neutrons to a few but very powerful neutron facilities as ILL, ISIS, FRM II and the future ESS in Europe. As expressed by Prof. Thomas Brückel and Prof. Sebastian Schmidt in their introductory remarks these bright lighthouses mainly serve the needs of a limited amount of experienced experimentalists, but the smaller or medium flux sources necessary for method development, user recruitment and user education, mere capacity, proof-of-principle experiments or operation of specialized instruments and methods seem to vanish.

Attended by experts from France, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Japan, the US and Germany the workshop presented and discussed current status and perspectives on the development, potential and design of compact accelerator driven neutron sources. Such compact sources could serve as local national or regional international medium-flux, but high brilliance neutron sources. All aspects regarding compact neutron production systems, compact target and moderator design, ion sources, accelerator systems, and instrument development were presented with leading activities at the CEA in Saclay, the Japanese network of university based neutron sources, at ESS Bilbao in Spain, JCNS in Jülich, ESS in Sweden and at ENEA in Italy.

The workshop initiated very open and fruitful discussions. The participants supported strongly actions to the integral optimization of all components of a compact accelerator driven neutron source as such an approach will offer very competitive facilities at an reasonable investments. Also smaller facilities for training and less challenging experiments will become affordable for “lab-based” experiments at larger Universities, thus assisting user recruitment for research with neutrons.

The participants discussed to establish a network to push forward the R&D on such sources and to continue to exchange information with future meetings.