Neutrons: The Swiss army knife of materials research

Open lecture by Dimitri Argyriou, Science Director of the ESS, on Tuesday, 18 October at Lund University.

The lecture will be held in lecture hall B of the Department of Physics, at 15.15. Coffee and cake will be served before the presentation.

Welcome!

Abstract:
Neutrons have been called beautiful because of their varied and unusual properties. Nobel Laureate Bertram Brockhouse said of neutrons that if we did not have them, we would need to invent them in order to study of materials. The basic advantage of neutrons are that they are charge neutral and thus highly penetrating, they obey conservation laws that allow us to probe both the time and spacial domains of materials, they posses a magnetic moment that makes them a probe of choice to investigate magnetism in materials and finally they exhibit sensitivity to light elements and isotopes since the scattering process is between a neutron and a nucleus.
These properties allow us to use neutron in a large variety of ways to examine materials from both the fundamental and technological perspective. The areas of relevance of neutrons to materials are as varied as the field of materials itself. It covers life science such as protein structure and dynamics, hard condense matter physics areas such as superconductivity and magnetism to technological applications such a stress mapping in engineering components and batteries.
In the talk I will describe the conversation laws and scattering process of neutron scattering in an introductory manner and then provide examples of the various techniques that are used to investigate topical problems in materials covering the wide spectrum of applications described above.