Bragg Institute News 2006
31 December 2006
In the year 2006, the Institute published a total of 133 refereed journal articles, almost twice the number in each of the two previous years. In addition, our staff gave a total of 14 invited talks at major national and international conferences, in Japan, China, Canada, the USA and Australia.
21 December 2006
ANSTO announced today the award of one of its 2 inaugural Senior Research Fellowships to Dr Klaus-Dieter Liss in the Institute. The focus of his fellowship will be to develop neutron and synchrotron scattering techniques as tools for investigating the effects of thermal and mechanical processes on the microstructure of alloys . Such processes are instrumental in properties of metal components both during production and during their use in extreme environments such as nuclear reactors and high-temperature boilers.
18 December 2006
The first neutron-diffraction pattern from OPAL was recorded today, on the ECHIDNA high-resolution powder diffractometer, as part of the commissioning process. These data were from sand (silica) from one of the local beaches on the Pacific Ocean.
11-13 December 2006
The 5th AINSE/ANBUG Neutron Scattering Symposium was held at Lucas Heights, with ~80 delegates attending. The Symposium featured a tour of the Neutron Guide Hall at OPAL (see above), a full-day session of talks in the Bragg Institute, and plenary talks by Takashi Kamiyama (KEK, Japan) and Dimitri Argyriou (Hahn-Meitner Institute, Germany), both on technical and scientific aspects of neutron powder diffraction.
The proceedings of the 8th International Conference o
n Neutron Scattering (ICNS2005), held in Sydney Australia in November/December 2005, has now been published electronically in the refereed journal Physica B, as a special edition: Physica B 385-386 (2006). The conference was organised by ANSTO, AINSE and ANBUG, and the guest editors (S. J. Campbell, J. M. Cadogan, M. Furusaka, N. Hauser, M. James, R. Osborn and C. C. Wilson) included 2 Bragg Institute members.
5 December 2006
AINSE announced today the appointment of its first 2 Research Fellows since 1993: Drs Darren Goossens (Australian National University) and Daniel Riley (U. of Melbourne). Both have worked extensively with the Bragg Institute in the past and are expected to make heavy use of the new OPAL Reactor.
2 more staff also joined the Institute this week: Dr Vanessa Peterson as instrument scientist for powder diffraction and Mr. Norman Xiong on our data-analysis team.
27 November 2006
It was announced today that ANSTO will receive $3.3M for a National Deuteration Facility to complement the neutron-scattering facilities at OPAL, particularly our small-angle neutron scattering and reflectometry instruments. This is part of the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. See the DEST website for more detail.
23 November 2006
Today we hosted a visit to the OPAL Reactor and the Bragg Institute by Cardinal George Pell, the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney.
3 November 2006
The OPAL reactor reached a power level of 20MW for the first time today.
Dr Saad Jakani also joined the Institute this week as a postdoctoral fellow working on problems in thermo-mechanical processing, as part of ANSTO's Neutrons for Engineering Project.
27 October 2006
The safety interlock system, for our neutron beam instruments at OPAL, has been featured in a press release by the component manufacturer, Pilz.
In addition, the implementation of a new thinner solid-liquid cell on the HIFAR neutron reflectometer has led to substantial performance improvements: the minimum measurable reflectivity Rmin has been reduced from 2.10-5 to 3.10-6. The target at the new PLATYPUS reflectometer at OPAL is 10-8.
20 October 2006
The OPAL reactor reached a power level of 10MW for the first time today.
16 October 2006
Four very experienced neutron researchers join us today from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the USA and the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands: Prof Don Kearley joins us to lead our team of scientific researchers; Dr Herma Buttner joins our User Office as Scientific Coordinator; Dr Bill Hamilton joins us as co-instrument scientist on the QUOKKA small-angle neutron scattering instrument; and Dr Mohana Yethiraj joins us as co-instrument scientist on the TAIPAN thermal 3-axis spectrometer.
14 October 2006
The OPAL reactor reached a power level of 1MW for the first time today.
13 October 2006
Our regulator ARPANSA today awarded ANSTO a licence to "hot-commission" the first three neutron-beam instruments at the OPAL Research Reactor: the ECHIDNA High-Resolution Powder Diffractometer, the KOALA Quasi-Laue Diffractometer, and the WOMBAT High-Intensity Powder Diffractometer
Dr Wu-Tsan Wu also joined us as a postdoc seconded from the National Central University, Taiwan, as part of the team working on the SIKA cold-neutron 3-axis spectrometer.
9 October 2006
The Australian Research Council announced today the success of a number of grant applications involving the Institute. Prof Cameron Kepert, supported by Chris Ling (joint lecturer with Sydney University), John Stride (joint lecturer with UNSW) and Rob Robinson, was successful in gaining $280k for a Physical Properties Measurement System, a crucial piece of equipment for thermodynamic, magnetic and transport measurements, to complement our neutron-diffraction and scattering facilities at OPAL.
In addition, Dr C. Pakes (U. of Melbourne), supported by Anton Stampfl (ASRP), was successful in gaining $445k for Infrastructure for Surface and Molecular-level Electronic and Spintronic Materials Measurement.
3 October 2006
Dr Robert Knott has been chosen to act as ANSTO's "ambassador to CSIRO", to consolidate and expand collaborative research between the two organisations. He will be seconded to the CSIRO (based in Melbourne) for the next 6 months in order to identify opportunities that lead to (i) collaborative research projects, (ii) joint research funding, (iii) joint supervision of students, and (iv) mentoring of postdoctoral research fellows and early-career scientists.
At the NOBUGS2006 Conference held this week in Berkeley, California, it was decided that the next conference in the series will be hosted by ANSTO in Sydney in November 2008. Around 75 attendees came to the Berkeley meeting, which featured a novel "Birds of a Feather" session on the Eclipse software led by Tony Lam.
22 September 2006
The new user web portal, for OPAL neutron beam users and visitors to ANSTO, was issued for internal testing within the Institute today. The portal will cover experimental proposals and reports, along with tracking of samples, resultant publications and so on.
20 September 2006
Dr Yang Fei leaves the Bragg Institute today, after 8.5 years, to take up a research position at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, funded by the Hong Kong Innovation and Technology Commission. We expect that Yang and his new group in Hong Kong will be major users of our neutron-scattering facilities.
17 September 2006
Dedicated visitor parking has been marked out close to both the Bragg Institute Building and the Neutron Guide Hall, in preparation for the start of the user program at OPAL.
1 September 2006
Today, we hosted a visit by an Argentinian delegation, including the Secretary of Science Technology and Productive Innovation, Tulio del Bono (second from right), and Director General of FONCYT, Dr Armado Betranou (third from left).
In addition, Dr Vladimir Luzin joined us, as instrument scientist for the KOWARI strain scanner, along with Oliver Kirstein. Vladimir comes most recently from the National Center for Neutron Research at NIST in Washington DC.
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ANSTO today signed a collaboration agreement with two New Zealand organisations, HTS-110 and Industrial Research Limited, for the construction of a novel high-Tc superconducting split-pair magnet for use on the small-angle neutron scattering (QUOKKA) and neutron reflectometry (PLATYPUS) instruments at OPAL. The magnet, shown schematically to the right, is designed to reach a magnetic field of 5T, and will be able to operate with the field either along the incident neutron beam or perpendicular to it. |
12 August 2006
The OPAL reactor achieved criticality at 23.20 today, for the first time.
11 August 2006
Fuel was loaded into the OPAL reactor for the first time today. For more detail, see ANSTO's media release.
The new Program Advisory Committee, providing advice to ANSTO on the neutron-beam user program at the OPAL reactor has also been instituted. The committee will meet for the first time in March 2007, and consists of Prof Jill Trewhella (Sydney U.; chair), Dr Craig Buckley (Curtin U.; incoming president of ANBUG), Prof Stewart Campbell (UNSW@ADFA), Prof Calum Drummond (CSIRO), Prof Martin Greven (Stanford U., USA), Prof Valerie Clinton (U. of Adelaide), Prof Hugh O'Neill (ANU) and an eighth member to be nominated by the National Science Council of Taiwan, who are providing our ninth instrument, the SIKA cold-neutron 3-axis spectrometer.
8 August 2006
Today a number of the roads around the new OPAL reactor were named after prominent physicists: Bragg Avenue, Shull Road and Brockhouse Road, after the Nobel Prize winners in Physics in 1915 and 1994, for the births of x-ray crystallography and neutron scattering respectively.
In addition, Dr Alison Edwards joined us on a 2-year secondment from the Research School of Chemistry at the Australian National University. Her interests lie in chemical crystallography, crystal-structure evaluation and crystallographic education.
31 July 2006
Scott Olsen joined us today as Ancillaries Manager. Scott joins us from Lake Technologies, and he will be responsible for all the sample environment apparatus (cryostats, furnaces, magnets, pressure cells, stress rigs, etc.) for our neutron beam instruments.
27 July 2006
20 Deputy Vice-Chancellors for Research from most of the Australian universities visited us today, following their 6 monthly meeting at University of Wollongong. The DVCs for Research from University of Western Australia (Doug MacEachern), Newcastle University (Barney Glover) and Curtin University (Linda Kristjanson) are shown at left with Bragg Institute Head Rob Robinson, with the QUOKKA small-angle-neutron scattering instrument as background. At right, ANSTO Chief of Research, George Collins, is shown with University of Wollongong's DVC-Research, Margaret Sheil, with the monochromator drum for one of our diffractometers behind.
16-17 July 2006
The Beam Instruments Advisory Group met for the twelfth 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. A major task was review of the full proposal for the PELICAN - the time-of-flight/polarisation-analysis spectrometer, our eighth instrument.
14 July 2006
ANSTO was today awarded a licence to operate the new OPAL Research Reactor by our regulator ARPANSA. A press release on the subject is available on the Web from ARPANSA.
In addition, one of our postdocs, Dr Amparo Lopez Rubio won the Development and Technology prize at the 39th Annual Australian Institute of Food Science and Technology Convention in Adelaide this week, for her poster on "biodegradable film made from amylopectin (a component of starch)".
7 July 2006
Dr Wim Klooster left the Bragg Institute today, after 5 years, to take up a joint position between the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering and the School of Materials Science and Engineering at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Wim led the effort to design and install the KOALA quasi-Laue diffractometer, which specialises in chemical crystallography, using single crystals, particularly of hydrogen-bonded systems. We expect that Wim and his new group in Singapore will be major users of our facilities, and he will also continue to serve on the Executive of the Australian Neutron Beam Users Group.
4 July 2006
A major agreement was signed today at the Institute between ANSTO and CSIRO, covering research collaboration in Food Science. Initial projects will study the structure of starch in relation to its long-term nutritional benefits in reducing the risk of colorectal cancer and the incidence of diabetes. The partnership brings the Bragg Institute's sophisticated neutron and X-ray capabilities in characterising materials together with CSIRO's broad food research capabilities through its Food Futures and Preventative Health Flagships. Food Science Australia ? a joint venture of CSIRO and the Victorian Government and the University of Queensland are also partners in the project.
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One of our AINSE students, John Daniels of Monash University, won one of two "Outstanding Poster by a Student" prizes at last week's 2006 Workshop of the ARC Australian Network for Research on Advanced Materials (ARNAM06) held at St John's College at the University of Queensland. John has worked closely with Drs Andrew Studer and Mark Hagen at the Bragg Institute, and his poster was entiltled "Time-resolved studies of ferroelectric materials during the application of electric fields."
8 June 2006
As part of the Australian Government's National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy(NCRIS), a draft Decadal Plan for Neutron Scattering (PDF) was posted today, on the NCRIS website. This plan draws heavily on advice from the Bragg Institute Advisory Committee, the Beam Instruments Advisory Group and the report from the Blue Mountains Workshop held in December 2005.
1 June 2006
The vacuum vessel for the secondary flight path of our new reflectometer PLATYPUS was delivered today. It is shown above with the larger vessel for QUOKKA the small-angle neutron scattering instrument.
15 May 2006
Dr Amparo Lopez Rubio joined us today from the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Spain), where she used synchrotron radiation and other techniques to study food preservation and high gas-barrier packaging materials. Amparo joins our Food Science project, which is collaborative with CSIRO, Food Sciences Australia and University of Queensland. Our portion of the project is led by DrElliot Gilbert.
1 May 2006
Dr Annemieke Mulders joined the Institute this week as the Bragg Fellow jointly between ANSTO and Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia.; Annemieke joins us most recently from the Swiss Light Source (Z?rich, Switzerland).
In the last week, Dr Catherine Kealley also joined us a postdoctoral fellow, from Curtin University, to work with Elliot Gilbert on problems in food science. A second postdoc, Dr Amparo Lopez Rubio also starts with us, on our Food Science project, on 15 May 2006.
31 March - 3 April 2006
The Institute is moving into its new 1000m2 purpose-built office building, directly adjacent to the neutron guide hall of the OPAL reactor. The 2-storey building features a number of improvements over our old home, Building 58: amenities for disabled, showers for both male and female staff/users, a bicycle rack and a sitting area for users and visitors. Access conditions will also be the same as for any other office building on the Lucas Heights site, and there is user parking directly adjacent to the new building.
29 March 2006
An agreement was signed today between ANSTO and the National Central University (Taiwan), covering the detailed arrangements for the SIKA cold-neutron 3-axis spectrometer. The President of the University, Prof Lou-Chuang Lee and ANSTO CEO Dr Ian Smith signed on behalf of the 2 institutions. This agreement fleshes out in detail the previous high-level agreement with Taiwan's National Science Council, signed on 8th June 2005.
Our Graphical User Interface GumTree won a prize as the Eclipse Foundation's Best Open Source Application at the EclipseCon 2006 conference in Santa Clara, CA.
21 March 2006
Prof Helen Garnett (shown right with OPAL Project Manager Greg Whitbourn and Bragg Institute Head Rob Robinson), Vice-Chancellor of Charles Darwin University, and former ANSTO CEO, visited us today and toured the new OPAL facility.
14 March 2006
One of our postdocs, Dr Andrew Nelson, as been appointed as second instrument scientist for the new PLATYPUS reflectometer, along with Dr Michael James. In the meantime, Andrew is responsible for the HIFAR reflectometer and shares responsibility for the AUSANS small-angle neutron scattering instrument. In the past 2 weeks, Andrew has hosted 2 Federation Fellows, Prof Anton Middelberg (U. of Queensland) and Prof William Ducker (U. of Melbourne), in succession performing neutron reflectometry experiments at HIFAR.
7 March 2006
Dr Peter Vorderwisch arrived today as a consultant to the Taiwan-funded SIKA Cold 3-Axis Spectrometer project. Peter is a very experienced researcher, having just retired from the Hahn Meitner Institute in Berlin, Germany, where he built and operated FLEX, one of the world's best cold triple-axis spectrometers. Peter is expected to be based in the Institute for 12 months.
1 March 2006
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The largest single component on any of our instruments, the 20-m long, 2.5-m diameter vacuum vessel for the state-of-the-art small-angle neutron-scattering instrument QUOKKA was delivered today. The vessel is shown leaving the manufacturer's site in Melbourne (above left) and in place in the OPAL neutron guide hall (above right).
In addition, the front-end optics (below) for the PLATYPUS reflectometer has been delivered, installed and aligned by Swiss Neutronics. Three of the four optical elements, for unpolarised applications, including free liquids, are shown with the fourth polarising element to be added later.
16 February 2006
"Cold Commissioning" of the new OPAL reactor commenced this week. This involves testing all reactor systems and equipment without fuel being loaded. During cold commissioning the reactor's designers, INVAP, and ANSTO will check that all systems operate and perform as expected. ANSTO will then provide the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) with detailed results. Consideration of those results will be one factor in ARPANSA's decision as to whether it issues an operating licence.
The Bragg Institute Building was completed today. We expect to move into the building by the end of March 2006.
7-10 February 2006
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ANSTO, mainly represented by the Bragg Institute (above), hosted the 30th Annual Condensed Matter and Materials Meeting in Wagga-Wagga this week. The meeting was held under the auspices of the Australian and New Zealand Institutes of Physics, at Charles Sturt University. Dr Dehong Yu has taken overall responsibility for organising the meeting. As part of the meeting, the Institute won the Lindsay Davis Cup for the 3rd time.
Dr Andrew Whitten also joined us as a postdoc this week, from the University of New England, to work with Prof Jill Trewhella on problems in structural biology, using small-angle neutron scattering.
2-3 February 2006
The Beam Instruments Advisory Group met for the eleventh 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. For the first time, the meeting was held at the new OPAL reactor, and the committee toured the Bragg Institute Building (above) which is very close to completion. Presentations were also made on the PELICAN - the time-of-flight/polarisation-analysis spectrometer and the SIKA cold-neutron 3-axis spectrometer, by Dehong Yu and Chun-Chuen Yang respectively. We are now heavily into the installation phase, with all major items ordered and around 70% delivered.
Australia Day 2006
3 Bragg Institute staff, Margaret Elcombe, Robert Knott and Dave Penny, have been awarded Australia Day Achievement Medals for their contributions to "the advancement of nuclear science and technology in Australia".
18 January 2006
Choices have been made for the names of our 8th and 9th neutron-beam instruments at at OPAL: PELICAN - the time-of-flight/polarisation-analysis spectrometer; and SIKA - the cold-neutron 3-axis spectrometer funded by the National Science Council of Taiwan.
13 January 2006
The data analysis team welcomes Dr Darren Kelly (PhD University of Sydney, formerly of DESY, Germany), Dr Jian Gui Wang (PhD University of Sydney, formerly of Grid Computing Lab, National Agriculture Research Centre, Japan) and Dr Bernadette Garner (PhD Monash, formerly of Ericsson). These 3 IT professionals join Paul Hathaway (team leader) and Dr Yang Fei to provide data reduction and analysis software for the Neutron Beam Instruments at OPAL.