ANSTO's research capabilities, led by the OPAL nuclear research reactor and associated instruments provide access to users investigating areas as diverse as materials, life sciences, climate change and mining/engineering.
Quokka - Small-Angle Neutron Scattering
| Instrument Scientists: Dr Elliot Gilbert Dr Katy Wood Dr Chris Garvey | To contact the Instrument Enclosure Phone 9717 3238 To contact the Instrument Cabin Phone 9717 7040 |
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More information on Quokka
In many ways our most important beam instrument at OPAL is the QUOKKA small-angle scattering instrument. It is the largest (40-m long after the guide bunker) and most expensive ($4.5M + IT and Electrical Engineering) of the operating instruments, and was a major driver for getting the high-performance cold source into OPAL. It will have the highest throughput of users, and will cover the broadest range of scientific areas.
Small-angle scattering is a powerful technique for looking at sizes and structures of objects on the nanoscale (1-10nm), like polymer molecules, biological molecules, defect structures in metals and ceramics, pores in rocks, magnetic clusters, magnetic flux lines in type-II superconductors and so on. ANSTO has both X-ray and neutron small-angle scattering adjacent to each other, and the advantage of neutrons is primarily for soft matter where the contrast-variation method (replacing hydrogen with deuterium) can be used.
In addition, it is useful for magnetic problems and ones in which large samples must be used. In many ways, small-angle scattering is complementary to electron microscopy while direct imaging is the domain of electron microscopy, SAXS and SANS can provide particle sizes, shapes and distributions averaged over a complete macroscopic sample. Small-angle scattering is rarely able to solve a problem on its own, and is typically used in conjunction with a number of other techniques.
SANS was crucial in showing that polymer molecules are self-avoiding random walks (Flory's prediction - Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1974), and that Type-II superconductors allow magnetic flux to penetrate, forming a lattice of magnetic vortices (Abrikosov's prediction - Nobel Prize in Physics, 2003). Other major achievements have been understanding viscosity modifiers in lubricants, solving the coarse structure of the ribosome, understanding the nature and role of particulate additives to tyres, and the porosity of sedimentary rocks in oil and gas reservoirs.
QUOKKA is very similar in the spirit to the 40-metre D22 instrument at Institut Laue Langevin in Grenoble, France and the 30-metre instruments on NG3 and NG7 at the National Institute for Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg in the USA.
More recently, user demand for small-angle neutron scattering has been such that two further small-angle neutron scattering instruments have been funded and are in design: the KOOKABURRA ultra-SANS instrument and the BILBY time-of-flight SANS instrument. Both are expected to be operational in 2013. We also have two in-house SAXS instruments: a pinhole-geometry Bruker-SAXS based on a rotating anode source, and the simpler Hecus-SAXS based on a micro-focus tube source.