Research you can do with the instrument
When neutron beams scatter at very low angles away from their original direction of travel, they are described as small angle scattering.
The scattering patterns contain information about the size and distribution of the scattering objects which can have sizes up to 500 nm.
Whenever you see halos surrounding the moon or sun, you are looking at small angle scattering. Ice crystals or water droplets in the atmosphere scatter the light into rings with distinct diameters depending on the crystal or droplet size. A wide range of sizes will cause the rings to interfere with one another, giving a diffuse, whitish glow, or aureole.
SANS is recognised as a powerful technique for determining microstructure in the dimension range of 1 to 500 nm. The LOQ SANS instrument at ISIS has been highly successful in pioneering the virtues of the white beam time-of flight method, the ability to access a wide range of scattering vectors, Q, (length scales) simultaneously with improved resolution. The experimental programme that has developed on LOQ has resulted in a throughput and publication record that is comparable with world-leading instruments.
Applications
- Soft condensed matter
- Rapid Screening of the Mesoscale Structure of Novel Multi-Component Materials
- Flow, Deformation and Processing
- Self-Assembly and Colloidal Interactions
- Biomolecular Materials
- Advanced Materials
- Metallurgy
- Magnetic Materials
