United Kingdom - Japan

Collaboration on Neutron Scattering

Neutron scattering is one of the most powerful methods to investigate atomic structure and dynamics of materials. It covers fields such as high-temperature superconductivity, magnetism, polymer science, material science, glass science, battery science, bio-science and so forth. KEK pioneered a pulsed neutron scattering technology since 1980's. It utilizes an accelerator-driven neutron source instead of a nuclear reactor. This technology gave an influence to the world and more intense pulsed neutron facilities have been built since then. Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in UK (RAL) is one of them. RAL established a facility, ISIS, in 1985, which has 50 times more intense pulsed neutrons. Our collaboration started for the mutual benefit and built a neutron chopper instrument, MARI in ISIS in 1990 which is an instrument for inelastic neutron scattering to investigate dynamics in materials. MARI produced quite outstanding results on studying dynamics of non-crystalline materials, hydrogenous materials, quantum-magnetic systems, high-Tc materials etc. Utilizing MARI, we verified that the pulsed neutron scattering method with chopper instrument is extremely suitable for investigating excitation from materials.

UK-Japan collaboration was extended to the second phase and built a new instrument, MAPS, which is a specifically designed chopper instrument for studying dynamics in single crystals. We are expecting to be able to obtain significant results on MAPS for understanding the mechanism of the high-Tc superconductivity, which has never clarified since the discovery in 1986. We send more than

20 physicists each year from KEK and universities to perform experiments in collaboration with researchers not only from UK but also from other countries.

		The author of this article, Professor Masatoshi ARAI, has been the leader of the project since 1999.