Illustrations
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Eight neutron beam instruments are planned for the new OPAL reactor. ANSTO expects to add more instruments within five years. The facility has the capacity for further expansion, including potential for a second neutron guide hall. A suite of ancillary equipment will enable studies at different temperatures, pressures and magnetic fields. | |
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| Platypus | ||
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Platypus is a time-of-flight neutron reflectometer. This instrument will be one of the world's top neutron reflectometers, with the added ability of studying films at the air-liquid interface ( free-liquid surfaces). Neutron refelctometry is used to study surfaces, thin films, buried interfaces, magnetic films, multi-layered structures and processes that occur aat surfaces and interfaces. | |
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| Reflector vessel | ||
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Neutrons travel from OPAL in tubes, called neutron guides, that have a special reflecting surface – supermirrors. The neutron guides begin 1.5 metres from the reactor core and continue through the primary beam shutters, without windows until the reactor face. Thermal and cold neutrons travel down separate guides, with guides typically 50 mm wide and between 150 mm and 300 mm high. Thermal neutrons are neutrons in the energy range comparable to room temperature, whereas cold neutrons are cooled by the cold source to energies comparable to liquid hydrogen. | |
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| Reactor pool | ||
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ANSTO's Small Angle X-ray Scattering ( SAXS ) instrument analyses all sorts of solid and liquid samples. X-ray scattering is a complementary technique to neutron scattering and provides valuable information about the nanostructure of samples. SAXS is installed in the guidehall at OPAL and is used to study any materials with structure of the length scale 1-100nm. | |
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