Results of first proposal round

On 30-31 May 2007 the Bragg Institute's Program Advisory Committee met for the first time assessing the proposals submitted for the powder diffractometers Echidna and Wombat.

The Program Advisory Committee in the coffee break (from left): Hugh O'Neill, Craig Buckley, Herma Buttner, Huan-Chiu Ku, Stewart Campbell and Calum Drummond.

 A total of 81 proposals were submitted requesting 357 beam days, spread over the 2 instruments (about 180 days requested per instrument). We have chosen to allocate 60 days of beam time per instrument. This corresponds to an oversubscription rate of a factor 3.
Letters to applicants on decision of beam-time allocations were sent out to the principal investigator. However, beam-time scheduling cannot take place until: (1) there is a published operating schedule for the OPAL reactor itself; and (2) we have operating licenses for Echidna and Wombat, from our regulator ARPANSA (Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency).
Please keep in mind that all scheduled experiments will need to provide Material Safety Data Sheets prior to the experiment for all samples and chemicals that will be brought to ANSTO.
Successful applications from researchers from AINSE member institutions were automatically forwarded to AINSE for consideration of travel/accommodation support.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions concerning your beam time.

Some statistics on proposals
57 proposals received beam time (including 12 block allocations): 31 on Echidna and 26 on Wombat covering scientific areas from bimolecular sciences to strongly correlated electron systems. The beam-time distribution is as follows:

The attribution is based on the location of the laboratory of the proposer and not their individual nationality. The majority of the non-Australian beam-time requests are in collaboration with researchers from Australian laboratories. Beam time per proposal was split in these cases and therefore we have half days in the table.