Spatz was originally the BioRef reflectometer transferred from the BER-II Research Reactor in Berlin, Germany, to ANSTO under an agreement with Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin (HZB). ANSTO operates one other neutron reflectometer Platypus at the OPAL Reactor and an X-ray reflectometer.
The transfer of the BioRef neutron reflectometer occurred in 2016, and installation and hot commissioning within OPAL’s Neutron Guide Hall completed in 2019. The neutron reflectometer has been renamed as “Spatz”, which is the German translation of sparrow - a common bird within Germany. Spatz transitioned to normal operations in 2020, and experiments can be submitted in the user portal.
The Spatz neutron reflectometer is a neutron beam instrument for studying the structure of surfaces and interfaces down at the nanoscale. Spatz can study materials from a wide range of science with applications including areas such as solar cell devices, quantum materials, biomaterials, drug delivery, polymer coatings, battery materials, and much more.
Both Spatz and Platypus are time-of-flight reflectometers, each with disc choppers to pulse the incident beam and define the wavelength resolution. Both instruments have position-sensitive detectors suitable for studying off-specular reflectivity. But while Platypus operates in a vertical scattering plane and is well suited for studies of free air-liquid surfaces, which are necessarily horizontal, Spatz operates in the horizontal scattering plane geometry, with reflection from a vertical surface. This has some advantages for air-solid, buried solid-solid and solid-liquid interfaces.
In addition, the detector can be swung to much larger angles allowing measurement of diffraction from multilayers and lamellar stacks. Finally, the geometry of Spatz allows use of a much wider range of our sample-environment suite, including the high-temperature vacuum furnace and a built-in infra-red spectrometer.
