Bragg Institute News
In the Australian Governments latest budget, it was announced that ANSTO will receive $37 million of new capital funding for new guides and instrumentation at OPAL. Following this, a two-day scoping workshop was held at the Institute on 27-28 August, with 80 researchers from Australia and overseas (below) to discuss both the scientific justification and project implementation.
As a result of this meeting, a report was published on the 2nd SANS instrument (Goanna or Bilby), a Back-scattering Spectrometer (Emu), a Neutron Radiography, Tomography and Imaging Station (Dingo). The workshop also came up with a prioritised list of sample-environment apparatus. The report is available from the Bragg Institutes website: http://www.ansto.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/43793/Scoping_Workshop_Report_final_a.pdf
Helping Out Our Canadian Friends
In the week of 6 October, we hosted Profs. Dominic Ryan (McGill University, Montreal) and Sean Cadogan (University of Manitoba) for experiments on our ECHIDNA high-resolution powder diffractometer on "the O(II) to O(I) structural transition in Gd5(Si,Ge)4". This is part of our effort to assist the Canadian neutron community while the NRU Reactor at Chalk River is shut down. Prof. Ryan is President of the Canadian Institute of Neutron Scattering, their user society. Interestingly, Prof. Ryan also gave a seminar at the Institute on "Why can't you use thermal neutrons to study gadolinium-based materials?"
Profs. Sean Cadogan (left) and Dominic Ryan (right) with instrument scientist Max Avdeev.
First Joint Paper from OPAL and Australian Synchrotron
The first refereed article featuring data from both the Australian Synchrotron (in Melbourne) and the OPAL Research Reactor (here in Sydney) has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Solid State Chemistry. The work was performed on the ECHIDNA high-resolution powder diffractometer at OPAL and the Powder Diffraction Beamline at the Australian Synchrotron, by researchers from The University of Sydney and staff of the two facilities.
The full reference is "Structural Studies of Ba2LaIrO6 - New Light on an Old Problem", Q. Zhou, B. J. Kennedy, M. Avdeev, L. Giachini and J. A. Kimpton, J. Solid State Chem. 182 (2009) 3195-3200.