Positive Spin Spring 2025

UK International Science Partnerships Fund (ISPF)

ISIS has recently received funding from the UK’s International Science Partnerships Fund (ISPF) for a variety of projects. Over the next couple of years, we will have some limited support for users from Malaysia, Indonesia, Canada and Brazil (contact Philip King if you’d like to know more).  The ISPF funding also provides for partnership working with PSI, which is likely to include a joint muon school between ISIS and SuS.

The next International Conference on Muon Spin Relaxation Rotation and Resonance  will be held in St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada from July 20 - July 25 2025.

Twinning opportunity for EU scientists

ISIS is part of an EU-funded project called NEPHEWS (Neutrons and Photons Elevating Worldwide Science)

Part of NEPHEWS involves giving EU researchers who haven’t used neutron / muon techniques before the chance to gain experience of experiments by joining some beamtime at a participating facility – a ‘Twinning’ programme. ISIS is part of this twinning activity, so we have funds to support travel and subsistence costs for EU researchers who’ve not used our techniques before to come to ISIS to sit in on an experiment (or on commissioning or calibration time, even).

If you know of any European researchers who aren’t so familiar with neutrons who you would like to bring to ISIS for an experiment, this would be a great opportunity to do this.

​There’s further information on the ISIS website and full details of eligibility for the Twinning programme can be found on the NEPHEWS website. Priority will be given to users from 8 countries (Estonia, Finland, Greece, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Ukraine), other EU Widening countries and countries without direct access to large scale research infrastructures in their country.

ISIS@40 Coffee Table Book

To celebrate our 40th year, ISIS has created a coffee-table book retrospective which showcases (in 300 pages!!) all aspects, and key milestones, of operation   over last four decades: from science, to staff, and instruments to infrastructure.
An e-version will be available online shortly. However, if you would like a hard copy please ask your Local Contact

Pulse Slicer

The pulse slicer removes the ends of each pulse of muons approaching the spectrometer, reducing the pulse width from ~100ns to 10ns. This increases the magnetic fields that Super-MuSR can measure. The Super MuSR pulse slicer was designed by Akanay Avaroglu and is currently being machined by Jamie Searis.

Detectors

At the end of the March cycle a production candidate stave of detectors was tested on beam. It performed well and has informed the final scintillator thickness choice, with a few electronic components to be updated to maximise performance. Production of the scintillator tiles will now begin in the next couple of months.Dan Pooley preparing to test the Super-MuSR production candidate detector stave.

We a delighted to announce the first beta release of the EVA software. This program allows for an easy, user friendly, visualisation of elemental analysis data. Current features are: quick identification of peaks (Muonic X-rays, or gammas), analysis of multiple peaks, muon stopping profile, simulated data and an interactive periodic table with Muonic X-rays, Gamma emission, and X-rays . The software can be found on the ISISmuon github site (see https://github.com/ISISMuon/EVA)