Good Vibrations Volume 17, Issue2 – September 2025

03 Sep 2025

We are honoured to announce the appointment of Dr. Sarah Rogers as Director of the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, effective 1 August 2025. We are pleased to welcome Sam Lambrick and Sophie Macari. Sam has joined MSG to work on the TOSCA+ upgrade and on VESPA at ESS. Previously he worked on helium spin-echo and helium microscopy at Cambridge University. In her placement year, Sophie will be continuing to develop the new online learning tools.

We would also like to extend our thanks to our Industrial Placement students for their valuable contributions during their placement year. Henry Graham worked on the in-situ DSC, Talha Nasir worked on the Raman Centre Stick, and
Natasha Goudarzi developed online training materials for our instruments. In addition, we congratulate Damien Cevaer on completing his MaMaSELF+ master’s program with his work on neutron Compton scattering.

Founder’s Award win for ISIS PhD student Katie Morton

We are delighted to announce that MolSpec PhD student Katie Morton has received the Founder's award for the most promising PhD student working in the field of porous materials. Katie's work spanned the disciplines of neutron spectroscopy, materials characterisation and both classical and ab Initio simulation methods.

Data Analysis:

The Mantid 6.13.1, upgraded to Python 3.11 with significant performance improvement, is available on Ada, formerly known as IDAaaS. Two new Bayesian algorithms, BayesQuasi2 and BayesStretch2, and a new fitting function, Teixeira Water IqtFT, have been added for QENS analysis. Improved atom selection and a new users defined Cache Directory options are available on abINS. An improved graphical users interface with interactive atom grouping is available on MDANSE 2.0.b (beta) with additional tutorials. Online training on QENS, DINS and, INS including videos on sample preparations and analysis available on Totara.

Instrument update

The IRIS team has successfully developed a differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) setup. Both liquid and solid samples can now be measured in situ on IRIS. If you are interested, please contact Mona Sarter.

Users Representative:

We sincerely thank Maria-Paula Marques for her three years of serving the users group as their representative. A new representative will be announced shortly to join Matthew Potter. We are grateful to Mona Sarter for her dedication and commitment as user group secretary over the past years and for smoothly passing the role on to Anna.