Neutrons and Coffee

Neutrons and Coffee

One of the vanishingly small number of perks of being on committees for the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) is that every now and then you get to see some very cool science or technology outside your own field.

Last week as part of our meeting, STFC Science Board visited a bunch of really really big lasers and the ISIS neutron and muon facility in Oxfordshire.

Neutrons are like protons (made of three quarks) but they have no electric charge. All atomic nuclei¹ need them in order to stay together.

At ISIS you can put various things into a beam of neutrons. Since they have no charge, they ignore the cloud of electrons round atoms and molecules, and just see the nuclei. How strongly they "see" them depends on the kind of nucleus and, for instance, they see the hydrogen in water much more clearly than the aluminium in an espresso maker. Hence:

... a video² made with neutrons. Wow.

Scientists and engineers come from all over Europe and beyond to use neutrons from ISIS. Neutron scattering allows physicists to study new materials, and allows engineers to watch how fluid flows round an engine, for instance. Also, bathing aircraft electronics in neutrons allows you to test how likely they are to fail under cosmic ray bombardments when they are at 10,000 metres. As a particle physicist who flies a lot, this appeals to me. As does the fact that ISIS is being used in research towards a international muon collider or neutrino factory.

The video was shown to us by Andrew Taylor, Director of ISIS, who also gave us coffee later. It was actually made at ILL³. ISIS and ILL have complementary applications, since ISIS is a spallation source which produces short intense bursts, whereas ILL is a reactor neutron source and provides a steady stream of neutrons.

The UK runs ISIS. We also own a third of ILL, which is in Grenoble, in another of the vital international collaborations which allow us to keep at the forefront ... I am struggling not to lapse into another "Science is Vital" rant here since the rest of the Science Board meeting was spent gloomily discussing scenarios for possible cuts.

Here's hoping George Osborne, Vince Cable et al are awake and can smell the coffee.

____

¹ Except hydrogen, which is just a single proton.

² Thanks to Andrew Taylor, and to Andrew Harrison, UK Director of ILL, for permission to use the video.

³ The video, not the coffee⁴

⁴ Well, the coffee we drank. Obviously, the coffee in the video was made at ILL. But it would be cold by now.