OPINION

Powerful sources bring opportunities | John Wood

Over the last 20 years, the growth of large-scale

research facilities has been prodigious. Just in the

last couple of years, construction has begun on new

synchrotrons in Australia, China, France, Spain, the

Middle East, and the UK. New spallation neutron

sources are under construction in Japan and the

USA. Various national and regional roadmaps show

that there is no shortage of potential projects lining

up for support over the next 20 years.

Why this sudden plethora of ideas and where are

they being driven from? The answer is that, in many

cases, it is the diverse user base in addition to

machine builders who are pushing the frontiers of

science forward around such cutting-edge

equipment. This is no less true for materials science

and engineering.

Recent examples of materials research using large-

scale facilities – in fields as diverse as archaeology,

the detection of stresses in aircraft components,

in situ measurement of bone density, and the

investigation of viral infections in living cells – show

how the breadth of science research continues to

expand. Many of these new applications relate to

real-time investigations in complex environments.

This growth has been made possible by the

incessant march of technology. This has manifested

itself not just in the increased speed, power, and

brightness of the accelerators that form the basis of

many of the facilities, but also in instrumentation

technology. Advances in the technology of radiation

detection, data acquisition, and sample manipulation

have all contributed.

The speed of data collection is becoming awesome.

Dependent on the facility, readings can currently be

taken at greater than microsecond resolution. With

new, proposed facilities approaching femtosecond

resolution, it will be possible to follow individual

atomic movements during reactions. Linked with

time resolution is the sheer amount of data

produced, which has to be stored, curated, and

archived so that it is open to data mining in the

future. This is a major challenge that is now

receiving international attention.

Gone are the days when users had to understand

how facilities worked and be capable of doing all the

data analysis themselves. While it is certainly

necessary to have people who push the technologies

to the limit, most users work alongside dedicated

experts who are involved as the project is being

planned, advise on which instruments to use, help

analyze the raw data, and

offer complementary

computer simulations to aid

interpretation.

In fact, an increasing number

of facilities are introducing a

service mode where a user

sends in a sample and the experiment is run

remotely or by experts at the facility. Control of the

experiment can be undertaken from one’s own office

and, if there are several distributed researchers, the

access grid allows communication between

individuals as they watch the results appear and

who, together, can take real-time decisions on

settings and the future of the experiment. Remote

handling is very useful for some industrial users,

such as pharmaceutical companies testing the design

of their drugs, aircraft manufacturers checking the

strains and stresses in components especially where

novel joining techniques are involved, and chemical

firms analyzing the extrusion of polymers under

different temperatures and pressures. A chocolate

manufacturer has even been able to enhance the

texture of its chocolate by analyzing and

understanding its six crystalline structures.

As sources become increasingly more powerful, the

opportunities for materials research will move

toward the study of system dynamics. Scientists will

be able to ‘see’ corrosion, battery decay, how

hydrogen is stored and released, or protein-substrate

interactions, among many others.

My own organization, the UK Council for the Central

Laboratory of the Research Councils, is coming to

the end of a consultation process that will result in

recommendations for how the UK should plan for

future provision of neutron sources for scientists

from a wide range of backgrounds. Many scientists

in the UK and elsewhere are not aware of the

potential offered by access to

the machines and the ancillary

resources for specimen

preparation, sample

environment, etc. One of the

major challenges of this exercise

has been marketing. How do we

reach out to scientists who

don’t currently use large-scale facilities to carry out

their research? It is now time that the materials

community took the initiative. Whatever system

you wish to look at, whether it is molten, highly

toxic, involves very high or very low temperatures,

or includes interfaces between material and

biological systems, there will be existing experience

of looking at all these cases and many more.

So do not be afraid to engage and check out the

potential. Whether you want to make real-time

studies of catalytic processes at the atomic scale, or

discover just what it is that makes the artificial

smart polymers you have created behave like

muscles, it is worth finding out if large-scale

facilities can help. There has never been a better

time for the materials community to get involved

and set the agenda for the future.

JAN-FEB 2006 | VOLUME 9 | NUMBER 1-2 56

John Wood FREng | Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils, UK |

J.V.Wood@cclrc.ac.uk

There has never been a better time for thematerials community to get involved and explore thepossibilities of synchrotrons and neutron sources

The growth in large-scale researchfacilities has beenprodigious