NSRRC neutron scattering group at ACNS

Full text: The National Synchrotron Radiation Research Centre (NSRRC) in Taiwan has a group of scientists stationed at the Australian Centre for Neutron Scattering (ACNS), ANSTO, Australia. Three Instrument Scientists were hired to operate neutron scattering instruments and to serve users; Chun-Min Wu works on Small angle neutron scattering instruments, Chin-wei Wang is a Powder diffractometer scientist and Shinichiro Yano works on the cold triple axis spectrometer SIKA. In addition, one staff member is a software engineer. Under this arrangement, we have built the cold triple axis spectrometer SIKA in the OPAL reactor beam hall at ANSTO. SIKA was designed to study dynamics in magnetic materials in the energy range of meV and below with high resolution. The Taiwan investment adds particular value to the area of materials science whereby Taiwan and Australia both benefit. Following 10 years of construction, SIKA has been in the user program since 2015 July with the number of scientific publications growing steadily since then. Taiwanese users now occupy about 20 percent of international proposals submitted to ACNS in the 2018-2 proposal round whilst the Taiwanese neutron scattering community is also growing. We hope for continued good relations between NSRRC and ANSTO with a view to expanding our collaboration. We are currently in the process of hiring an additional instrument scientist who would be working on a reflectometer at ACNS. In this talk, we will present scientific outcomes from the NSRRC neutron group and updates from SIKA. (author)