NcNeutron

The Norwegian Center for Neutron Research, NcNeutron, is a national research infrastructure funded by the Research Council of Norway that gives the Norwegian research community and industry access to one of the most advanced neutron scattering facilities in Europe. Neutron beamtime is available at the SINQ source at Paul-Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Switzerland on a separate quota for Norwegian users.

Deadlines

The deadlines for proposals are usually mid-May and mid-November, aligned with the general PSI deadlines.

All instruments at SINQ that are open for external access can be accessed through NcNeutron. These include instrumentation for powder and single crystal diffraction, small angle scattering, imaging, spectroscopy and strain scanning. The current list of instruments can be found on the SINQ web-page.

Submission

The next deadline is 15 November, 2024. The proposal is submitted via the PSI Digital User Office DUO. New users are kindly asked to contact the instrument scientists before submitting a proposal to discuss instrumental options and reasonable beam time requests. Guidelines for the proposal submission and further useful information can be found on the SINQ webpages.

Proposal evaluation

The NcNeutron proposals will be evaluated following the general SINQ guidelines by a panel of mainly Nordic specialists in the relevant fields.
Typically, each proposal will be sent to two independent experts. After the local evaluation, the grades and proposed time allocation will be transferred to the DUO system at PSI.

Instrument scientist at PSI will then do the final distribution and allocation of beamtime dependent on the total beamtime available at each instrument.

Local contact persons at IFE for main experimental techniques

Power neutron diffraction – Bjørn C. Hauback – bjorn.hauback@ife.no
Small angle neutron scattering – Kenneth D. Knudsen – Kenneth.knudsen@ife.no
Neutron imaging – Stefano Deledda – stefano.deledda@ife.no

Background

In 2021 IFE and PSI started a collaboration with Paul-Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Switzerland. This collaboration was initiated to continue the activity at the Norwegian Center for Neutron Research (NcNeutron) and offers beam access to the research community after the closure of the JEEP-II reactor at Kjeller. The agreement between IFE and PSI was formalized during summer 2021, and IFE has a postdoc stationed at PSI as part of the agreement. The first call under this collaboration had deadline on June 7, 2021, and 30 days of neutron beam time were allocated. Approximately 50 days of beamtime is reserved per year, on average, to the Norwegian community.

Partners and collaborators

IFE, University of Oslo, University of Stavanger, SINTEF, NTNU, PSI

The project is supported by the Research Council of Norway through project 245942/F50 with an overall allocation of 31 million NOK.

Research on assignments

IFE does research on assignments. Please contact: