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PREFACE

For over half a century neutron scattering has added valuable information about the structure of materials and many experiments have been performed. Contrary to X-rays that have quickly become a standard laboratory technique and are available to all modern researchers in physics, chemistry, materials and earth sciences, neutrons have been elusive and reserved for specialists. A primary reason is that neutron beams, at least so far, are only produced at large dedicated facilities with nuclear reactors and accelerators and access to those has been limited. Yet there are a substantial number of experiments that use neutron scattering as the following summary from some large facilities documents:

Approved User Proposals

Facility 1995 2005 ILL 697 696 ISIS 633 581 IPNS 92 138 Lujan 136 306

These numbers are lower than for synchrotron facilities such as ESRF (781 for 2005) and APS (1083 for 2005) but not by a large amount. This is rather surprising since neutron scattering is so much weaker than X-ray scattering and experiments take much longer. Clearly, Europe has been dominating in neutron research with three times as many experiments than in the U.S., at only the two largest facilities. But usage has stabilized, whereas in the U.S. there has been a steady increase over the last decade and new users come increasingly from fields such as materials and earth sciences. With the . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Rudy Wenk

Dept. Earth and Planetary Science University of California at Berkeley, September 2006