Bragg Institute News 2005

19 December 2005

Deuterium was liquified for the first time in the OPAL cold neutron source today.

In addition, Dr Dehong Yu took up the role of instrument scientist for the 8th instrument at the new OPAL reactor, the time-of-flight/polarisation analysis spectrometer.

9 December 2005

At today's AINSE Council Meeting at University of Queensland, in Brisbane, long-time Bragg Institute researcher Shane Kennedy was presented with the 2005 AINSE Gold Medal, for his research in condensed-matter physics using neutron scattering. This is the first time that AINSE has honoured an ANSTO employee in this way.

2-4 December 2005

Back row: Tom Holden, Thom Mason, Wen-Hsien Li, Roger Pynn, Feri Mezei, Garry McIntyre, John Thornton
Middle row: Klaus-Dieter Liss, Mike James, Andrzej Radlinski, Darren Goossens, Stewart Campbell, Ian Gentle, John Stride
Front row: Roland G?hler, Shane Kennedy, Margaret Elcombe, Kazu Kakurai, Chris Ling, Elliot Gilbert, Jill Trewhella, Rob Robinson, Craig Buckley, Mike Fitzsimmons, Winfried Petry, Greg Warr
Not included in photograph: Brendan Kennedy, Tony Klein.

A group of 28 international experts and Australian research leaders met at the historic Hydro-Majestic Hotel in the Blue Mountains to discuss "What would you do in the next 15 years, if you were in our shoes, with a brand-new 20-MW reactor, and 9 funded instruments?", immediately following the 2005 International Conference on Neutron Scattering. The attendees came from ten leading overseas neutron laboratories, regional collaborators in Taiwan and Japan, the Australian user community, and a modest representation from ANSTO. All those who have pushed for specific beam-line capabilities for the second-wave of instruments at OPAL, in recent years, were also invited. The report is now available on the web.

27 November - 2 December 2005

Approximately 750 neutron scatterers from 38 countries in 6 continents descended on Sydney, for the eighth International Conference on Neutron Scattering. The conference, with John White (ANU) and Trevor Hicks (Monash U.) as honorary chairs and held under the auspices of the Bragg Institute, AINSE and ANBUG, was held in the Sydney Convention Centre, right at the water's edge in Sydney Harbour, and featured a wonderful dinner cruise for the majority of delegates, with fine views of Sydney Opera House, Sydney Harbour Bridge and the southern night sky. Another highlight of the meeting was the Wednesday afternoon visit to the new OPAL reactor, which is essentially complete and which will commence hot commissioning in early 2006. 

A strong scientific program was constructed, with plenary talks covering the whole range of neutron applications from engineering and the earth sciences to biophysics, in addition to the traditional neutron strengths in polymers, correlated-electron physics and materials discovery. A particular highlight was a keynote lecture by the year's Buckley Prize winner, Gabriel Aeppli, on "Neutrons and Nanotechnology", showing how neutrons continue to contribute in strong complementarity to scanning-probe methods. There were also 2 special symposia on macromolecular (protein) crystallography and neutron interference/coherence. In addition to the strong program of oral presentations, two massive poster sessions were held - few attendees had ever seen so many posters (>300 on each evening) presented together in a single spacious room. In another evening session, prizes were given out by the Japan Society for Neutron Science, to Kazu Yamada of Tohoku University, and the Walter Halg Prize of the European Neutron Scattering Association to Albert Furrer and Hans-Ulrich G?del from Switzerland. 

It was the first time that this conference had been held in the Southern Hemisphere, and the first time outside of Europe, North America or Japan. We were particularly pleased to see a large number of delegates from neighbouring countries in South-East Asia, and acknowledge support from the International Atomic Energy Agency in supporting their presence. All in all, it was an excellent meeting of the whole neutron family, spread around the world as we are. The next international meeting in the series will be in the United States, at a location yet to be decided, in 2009.

18 November 2005

The full program for ICNS2005 became available including the oral abstracts and the poster sessions. There were poster sessions on Monday and Tuesday of the conference.

16 November 2005

Dr Annemieke Mulders, who is presently working at the Swiss Light Source, just outside Zurich, Switzerland, has been offered and has accepted the Bragg Fellowship position jointly between Curtin University and ANSTO. She is expected to arrive in May 2006, and will maintain a substantial research presence both at the Bragg Institute and at Curtin. 

10 November 2005

The ASRP's new soft X-ray end station has been delivered to the National Synchrotron Radiation Research Centre in Hsinchu, Taiwan, where it is undergoing commissioning tests. The end-station represents a major-step for Australian soft X-ray research, giving scientists access to superior nano-fabrication/preparation and characterization facilities while working either on, or off, one of seven potential beam-lines. The end-station will be transferred to the soft X-ray beam line at the Australian Synchrotron in Melbourne once the beam-line is operational, which is expected to be in 2008 . For more details on the soft X-ray end-station's capabilities and gaining beam-time at the National Synchrotron Radiation Research Centre, please contact Anton Stampfl.

9 November 2005

The Australian Research Council announced today the success of a number of grant applications involving the Institute. Chris Ling (joint lecturer with Sydney University) was successful in gaining $210k for Australia's first floating-zone crystal growth furnace, a crucial piece of equipment if we are to make full proper use of the two 3-Axis spectrometers under construction at OPAL.

In addition, John Riley (La Trobe University), supported by Dehong Yu and Anton Stampfl, was successful in a $623k proposal for Australia's first Molecular-Beam Epitaxy growth system for metals, a crucial piece of equipment for making spintronic materials and devices that can by well studied by polarised-beam neutron reflectometry on our new reflectometer PLATYPUS.

Jill Trewhella (Federation Fellow, jointly with Sydney U.) was also successful in her $950k proposal on "Facility for Structural Analysis of Bio-Molecular Complexes and Self Assembly", which will provide a second SAXS instrument in Sydney.

26-27 October 2005

above left: visit with the President of National Central University; above right: our key partners - Prof. Tsang-Lang Lin of National

5 Bragg Institute staff attended the First Australia-Taiwan Meeting on Neutron Scattering Science, which was held as a satellite to the the Eleventh Users Meeting of the National Synchrotron Radiation Research Centre in Hsinchu, Taiwan. Invited talks were also given by Peter Vorderwisch (Hahn Meitner Institute, Germany) and Yasuo Endoh (Tohoku University, Japan). In addition to exchanging information on use of the OPAL neutron-beam instruments with a broad section of Taiwan researchers, there was also significant discussion of the design of the Taiwan-funded cold 3-axis spectrometer to be built at OPAL. 

20 October 2005

Construction of the new Bragg Institute building is proceeding very well, with the windows installed and internal walls going up.

12 October 2005

Our neutron and X-ray reflectivity refinement package MOTOFIT has been made available for use by others, by means of an open-source licence. MOTOFIT was written by Andrew Nelson at the Bragg Institute, and is a set of functions that aid the least squares fitting of specular X-ray and neutron reflectivity data, using Parratt's recursion formula. It works within the analysis package IGOR Pro (Wavemetrics), and was created in version 5 of IGOR.

6-7 October 2005

We have just held a 2-day joint workshop with CSIRO, Australia's leading research organisation, to explore ways in which CSIRO researchers can collaborate with the Bragg Institute and use the beam facilities coming on line at the new OPAL reactor. Around 50 attendees came, half from each organisation. 6 of CSIRO's divisions were represented: Molecular & Health Technology, Manufacturing & Infrastructure Technology, Energy Technology, Industrial Physics, Petroleum Resources, and Textile & Fibre Technology. The meeting was introduced by Drs. Rod Hill (Group Executive, CSIRO Information, Manufacturing and Minerals) and Ian Smith (Executive Director of ANSTO), and included a tour of the neutron guide hall at OPAL (see image above).

The 1m² detector for the QUOKKA small-angle neutron scattering instrument also arrived at the Bragg Institute, from ORDELA in the USA. The first of our granite dancefloors (for PELICAN the time-of-flight/polarisation-analysis spectrometer) has also been put in position.

23 September 2005

The first beam shutter, for cold beamlines CG1 and CG3 serving QUOKKA, PLATYPUS and the time-of-flight/polarisation analysis spectrometer, at the OPAL reactor has been installed. The beam centre lines have now been defined.

Schedules for our X-ray reflectometer and SAXS machine are also now posted on the web, for the first time.

1 September 2005

A memorandum of understanding was signed today in Melbourne between ANSTO and the University of Melbourne, to encourage collaborative research between researchers at the 2 institutions. Prof. Glyn Davis (Vice-Chancellor, U. of Melbourne) and Dr Ian Smith (Executive Director, ANSTO) signed for the partners. A number of senior researchers at the university attended the signing ceremony.

Janelle Jenkins has joined the Bragg Institute as business manager, from ANSTO Information Management. Our previous business manager, Kevin Morrison, continues to work with us on the Neutron Beam Instruments project (including provision of key spares) and the Bragg Institute building, as part of a more focussed effort managing the whole OPAL-reactor construction finances.

Dr John Stride also joined the Bragg Institute this week to take up a joint lectureship between ANSTO and University of New South Wales (School of Chemical Sciences). John joins us most recently from the Institut Laue Langevin (Grenoble, France), the leading neutron research institute in the world, where he was responsible for the IN4 thermal-neutron time-of-flight spectrometer.

18 August 2005

The first complete neutron-beam instrument for the OPAL reactor, the KOALA Quasi-Laue Diffractometer, arrived today from Maatel in Grenoble, France. The instrument was tested in a neutron beam at the ILL reactor in Grenoble, before shipping to Australia.

Neutron guide installation also commenced today.

16 August 2005

Dr Jamie Schulz has been appointed as Operations Manager for the Neutron Beam Facilities at the OPAL reactor. His responsibilities will include all operational aspects (including neutron and X-ray equipment) in the Neutron Guide Hall, Reactor Beam Hall and Bragg Institute Building, and shared responsibilities (with Reactor Operations, and yet to be defined in detail) for the OPAL Visitors Centre. The Operations Manager will also be responsible for the User Interface for neutron beam users at OPAL, including databases, proposals, scheduling, user feedback, quality system, safety induction, training, etc. He will be the primary Bragg-Institute interface with Reactor Operations, AINSE, Security, Engineering, Safety, RRR-Project, etc. for all of the Bragg Institute's operational activities at OPAL. Dr Andrew Nelson is taking over responsibility, together with Dr Robert Knott, for the operation of AUSANS.

Dr Margaret Elcombe will continue to play the analogous role for the Bragg Institute at HIFAR.

9 August 2005

A celebratory morning tea was held to mark to formal opening of OPAL-X: the new X-ray facilities, consisting of X-ray Reflectometry and Small-Angle X-ray Scattering (shown at the right with Federation Fellow, Prof. Jill Trewhella, and Bragg Institute Head, Rob Robinson). These 2 new state-of-the-art facilities, which are unique in the Sydney Basin, complement the equivalent neutron instruments, PLATYPUS and QUOKKA which are almost immediately adjacent, within the same building. The Bragg Institute will be one of only 2 institutions in the world with such complementary x-ray and neutron facilities on the same site.

4 August 2005

You can have a look at the program for the 2005 International Conference on Neutron Scattering (held in Sydney between 27 November and 2 December 2005).

As of the 4th of August, 489 delegates had registered, with the geographical distribution in the table below.

14-15 July 2005

The Beam Instruments Advisory Group met for the tenth time at Lucas Heights and reviewed progress on the seven instruments approved so far, along with the IT and Electrical Engineering infrastructure for instrument suite. We are now heavily into the procurement phase, with major items arriving regularly on site. John Dunlop (CSIRO Industrial Physics) joined the committee for the first time. It is anticipated that the group will continue to meet every 6 months until February 2007, when the OPAL reactor and its initial suite of instruments will be operating fully.

6 July 2005

Prof. Jill Trewhella, has started with the Bragg Institute as ANSTO's first Federation Fellow. Jill holds her position jointly between Sydney University and ANSTO, and she has advertised for an ANSTO-funded postdoctoral fellow to work with on problems in biophysics using small-angle neutron and X-ray scattering.

Also this week, we took delivery of our new state-of-the-art small-angle x-ray scattering instrument, which is installed directly adjacent to the new QUOKKA small-angle neutron scattering instrument. Commissioning is almost complete. This instrument is unique in New South Wales, and is likely the best laboratory-based SAXS machine in Australia, prior to commissioning of the new SAXS machine at the Australian Synchrotron in Victoria in 2007 or beyond. 

For more details on the new SAXS machine, please contact Dr Tracey Hanley. It is available to Australian and New Zealand university users via AINSE.

15 June 2005

In the present round of Federation Fellowships, it has been announced that Prof. Jeremy Smith (presently with University of Heidelberg in Germany) has been awarded a Federation Fellowship in "Neutron Scattering in Biology". This is the second successful Federation Fellowship application involving ANSTO. Jeremy is a leading researcher in the field of computational molecular biophysics and he is recognised as one of the leading biomolecular system modellers in the world and has established computer simulation as a stepping stone between experiment and analytical theory in the examination of motions in complex biological systems. He has made major contributions to the understanding of enzyme reaction mechanisms, retinal proteins and ion pumping mechanisms, large-scale conformational change, muscle contraction, cancer detection and work towards designing an AIDS vaccine.

8 June 2005

An A$8.5 million science deal between ANSTO?s Bragg Institute and the National Science Council of Taiwan, was signed today in Taipei, allowing Australian researchers to further expand their scientific capabilities. This is the first major scientific deal to be struck between institutes from Australia and Taiwan, and covers the installation and operation of a 9th neutron-beam instrument at the OPAL reactor: a cold-neutron 3-axis spectrometer, designed to study the dynamics of electronic materials in the energy range of meV and below. The Taiwan investment adds particular value to the area of high-technology electronic materials science where Taiwan is strong and in which Australia can also reap benefits. Taiwanese scientists will be guaranteed access to the Bragg Institute?s facilities equivalent to 70% use of the instrument. The remaining time will be available to the Australian and international research community. The instrument will take around four years to build, and the agreement lasts for five years from the instrument?s commissioning, renewable for five year periods after that.

In parallel with this announcement, Drs. Chun-Chuen Yang and Sheng-Yun Wu (National Central University, Chungli), shown on the right outside the OPAL Neutron Guide Hall, joined us to start work on the conceptual design of their cold-neutron 3-axis spectrometer.

7 June 2005

Construction started today on the 1000m² Bragg Institute Building, which is set to house ~60 staff, visitors and users. The new building is directly adjacent to the Neutron Guide Hall at the OPAL reactor, and it will be complete by mid-February 2006.

2 June 2005

Abstract submission for the 2005 International Conference on Neutron Scattering, closed. A total of 765 abstracts were submitted from around the world.

In addition, one of our AINSE students, Cat Kealley from Curtin University won a prize at the recent 3rd Meeting of the International Union of Microbeam Analysis Societies in Florence, Italy, for her work, partly at ANSTO, on "Development of Carbon Nanotube Reinforced Hydroxyapatite Ceramics"

20 May 2005

The bulk of the motion stages for the 7 initial instruments at the OPAL reactor have undergone factory acceptance testing at AZ-Systemes factory in Grenoble, France, prior to shipping to ANSTO. The image shows 3 sample-position stacks on a test dance floor. These assemblies move around on high-precision airpads.

10 May 2005

The Australian Neutron Beam Users Group has just completed a survey of its membership, regarding likely demand for the initial set of instruments at the OPAL reactor, and of candidates for the next wave of instruments to be constructed after 2007. From a total society membership of ~250, 130 members responded and aggregate demand from these responses (in instrument-days) is shown below. The OPAL reactor is scheduled to run 340 days per year, and these data would indicate that at least half of the initial instruments will be oversubscribed right from the beginning. For more detail, and the results for future instruments, see www.anbug.org/opal_user_survey_results.html 

11 April 2005

Maxim Avdeev joined us today, from Jim Jorgensen's group at Argonne National Laboratory, to take responsibility for the Medium-Resolution Powder Diffractometer at HIFAR and our powder-diffraction software infrastructure, including our Rietveld program RIETICA. Earlier in his career, Maxim worked at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia.

Also today, Kia Wallwork, who has been an ASRP-funded postdoc with the Bragg Institute for the last 2 years, moved on to take up an instrument scientist position with the Australian Synchrotron Project in Melbourne, as instrument scientist for its powder-diffraction beamline.

The second of the area detectors for the new instruments at the OPAL reactor arrived today, for the PLATYPUS reflectometer.

6 April 2005

Former Bragg Institute members, Brett Hunter and Vanessa Peterson, have been awarded the 2004 Brunauer Award of the Cements Division of the American Ceramic Society for their paper entitled "Tricalcium Silicate T1 and T2 Polymorphic Investigations: Rietveld Refinement at Various Temperatures Using Synchrotron Powder Diffraction", J. Am. Ceram. Soc., 87, 1625-1635 (2004). The award is for the best paper on the topic of cements published by the American Ceramic Society during the previous year. This research was performed while working at ANSTO, and was featured in an earlier form in our 2001 web highlight on Cement Research. 

Abstract submission for the 2005 International Conference on Neutron Scattering, opened with the closing date is 31 May 2005.

28 February 2005

Registration for the 2005 International Conference on Neutron Scattering, opened during this month. The website for submission of abstracts for contributed papers was opened from 15 March. The Conference was be held at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre, right on the waterfront in Sydney Harbour, between 27 November and 2 December 2005.

Dr John Stride, presently at the Institut Laue Langevin in Grenoble, France, has accepted the Joint Lectureship in Chemistry, with the University of New South Wales. John is presently responsible for the IN4 thermal time-of-flight spectrometer in Grenoble. John is expected to start with the Bragg Institute and UNSW in September 2005.

The first large component for any of our new instruments arrived safely in Sydney, the collimation section of the Echidna high-resolution powder diffractometer.

18 February 2005

The contract for construction of the new Bragg Institute Building, a 1000m² building to house 60 staff, users and visitors, has been signed. Construction will start in April 2005, with completion expected in February 2006.

Our new closed-cycle cryomagnet system supplied by Cryogenic Limited was tested satisifactorily at ANSTO at fields up to 7.4T, and is now available for use in neutron beams.

Funding for this apparatus was supplied by the Australian Research Council, AINSE and ANSTO

10-11 February 2005

A small focussed workshop on "Neutron Scattering in High Magnetic Fields" was held in Queenstown on the South Island of New Zealand, as part of the AMN-2 International Conference on Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology. The workshop was sponsored by the MacDiarmid and Bragg Institutes, and featured attendees from Industrial Research Limited, HTS-110 a Wellington-based start-up company commercialising high-temperature-superconductor current leads and magnets, and ANSTO. Invited talks from other than Australia/New Zealand included "The N40T and N25T High Magnetic Field Projects at the Hahn-Meitner Institute" by Michael Meissner (BENSC, HMI), "Committee on High Magnetic Fields - Summary of the US National Research Committee Study" by Mike Rowe (NIST), and "Options for Neutron-Scattering Magnets" by John Miller (NHMFL, Tallahassee). In conclusion, it was recommended that (1) we explore the possibility of building a 3-5T high-Tc magnet for SANS and neutron reflectometry, (2) we look at acquiring a 15-T split pair system like those available in Europe, and (3) that we engage with the emerging collaboration between SNS, APS and NHMFL in the USA, which will likely build magnets in the 25-T range for both neutron and synchrotron applications.

7-8 February 2005

The Beam Instruments Advisory Group met for the ninth time at Lucas Heights and reviewed progress on the seven instruments approved so far, along with the IT and Electrical Engineering infrastructure for instrument suite. Stewart Campbell (UNSW at the Australian Defence Force Academy) and Kath Smith (ANSTO Materials) joined the committee, the former as the incoming President of ANBUG.

24 January 2005

Dr Brendan Nelson, Federal Minister for Science, Education and Training today announced the official name, OPAL, for the Australian Replacement Research Reactor. "OPAL is a name designed to give this $330 million scientific investment a recognisably Australian name, said Dr Ian Smith, ANSTO's Executive Director. "We aim to make this OPAL as internationally renowned as the Australian gemstone." "OPAL will attract a great deal of scientific attention due to its unique technological features," Dr Smith continued. "It will enable us to deliver up to four times the quantity of life-saving medical isotopes we currently produce, and generate neutron beams thousands of times more intense than our current reactor, allowing scientists to look at complex atomic structures. "OPAL will enhance the diversity of the fields our science can be applied in, across environmental, medical and industrial spectrums. "The new reactor will begin operation in 2006, with its name based on its open pool and light-water characteristics," continued Dr Smith. "A naming competition held amongst Australian school students influenced the decision for the name, particularly entries from St John Bosco College located near ANSTO and Parnarna Area School on Kangaroo Island in South Australia."