Scientific horizons at the Institut Laue-Langevin

摘要

In order to maintain the scientific value of the ILL and to respond to the changing needs of its broad user community throughout Europe and beyond, in 2001 the Millennium Programme (Phase M-0, 2001a€“2008) was launched to boost the quality of ILL's experimental facilities. The ongoing renewal programme has been directed to-wards renewing some of the neutron delivery systems a€“ neutron guides and beam tubes a€“ towards improvement of sample environment and installation of user-friendly data acquisition/handling systems, and in particular towards upgrading neutron instrumentation.Already at this stage, the upgrading of eleven instruments and some neutron delivery systems has increased the overall efficiency (expressed in terms of count rates) of ILL's instruments suite by more than a factor of 14. This does not only render the time for a neutron scattering experiment much shorter but, in particular, does open access to new scientific challenges such as in nanoscience and biology where often only small samples are available.In the recently launched Phase M-1 (2007a€“2013), five new instruments as well as new neutron guide systems will be built with the emphasis on neutron diffraction and spectroscopy with cold neutrons. This will further boost the application of neutron scattering techniques to materials science problems and to condensed matter research, and will keep the institute at the forefront of neutron science well beyond 2020.