Progress on Bilby

Date: 16/06/2015
Source: http://www.ansto.gov.au

In the last week, we have made great progress in the commissioning of the new Bilby time-of-flight small-angle scattering instrument. We now have good data sets from a silver behenate standard sample, with data from all three planes of detectors and the vacuum system working.

For the last few months we have been working through a number of teething problems with the detector electronics, and their interaction with the vacuum system.

Time slice corresponding to a wavelength of ~4.5Å The image was produced using the MANTID software package.

The time slice shown corresponds to a wavelength of ~4.5Å, and detector planes are at 3, 4 and 6.2m, working from left to right. The Debye-Scherrer ring corresponding to the fundamental Bragg peak is clearly visible in the 3-m bank, which masks a portion of the 4-m bank. We run the vacuum at around 8 × 10^-5 mbar. The image was produced using the MANTID software package.

Congratulations to project leader Anna Sokolova, and fellow instrument scientists Andrew Whitten and Liliana de Campo on achieving this important milestone. Of course, many others in the Institute have contributed to this success, especially including the computing & electronics and electrical engineering