First Neutron Pulse from SNS 145
kebes writes "The $1.4 billion Spallation Neutron Source is nearing completion, and has produced its first neutron pulse. The SNS is a scientific instrument that generates beams of neutrons, which can be used to probe anything from minuscule samples to industrial materials. When fully operational, the facility is expected to host up to 2,000 international scientists annually."
Extremely Cost-prohibitive to use (Score:4, Insightful)
'The machine is so powerful that in one year it will use about the same amount of electricity as a town of 30,000.'
If we assume that the average person has an electric bill of $1000/yr, that would be $30,000,000/yr, or about $82,200/day just in electricity costs.
I imagine that lots of scientists would want to play around with this- I would certainly have fun with it given the chance. At that price, though, only extremely well-funded researchers could afford to use this machine.
But, what does it do? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It would be cool... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:This is exciting! (Score:3, Insightful)
The trick is that SNS produces a lot more of them and in a beam. You can't focus neutrons as efficiently as you can light or electrons.
Re:How do they make a pulsed neutron beam? (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually its pretty straight forward - whack a bunch of protons into a target and neutrons drop out. The protons react with nuclei in the target to produce neutrons (and pions and a whole load of other junk). The protons need to be reasonably high energy (say at least relativistic) to get a good neutron yield.
Usually you use a heavy metal as the target. High nuclear mass so that there are lots of protons and neutrons to collide with, high melting point/tough so you don't damage the target too much when the protons go into it. The target is probably actively cooled or you might want to try a liquid metal target at high intensities so that it cools itself. Watch out that you can build pipes to contain the liquid that aren't destroyed by the incoming proton beam. Then you collimate the neutrons coming out and possibly slow them down using something like carbon.
Jobs a good 'un!
Re:But, what does it do? (Score:3, Insightful)
For carbon and hydrogen based matters like DNA, RNA, protein and polymer, in many case, it is very hard to get good contrast from either X-ray or electron beam. But by replacing hydrogen with deuterium, we can actually control the contrast from neutron beam. To be simple, neutron is extreme important to the research in biology area and soft condensed materials.
Neutron has pretty long wave length, thus it can be used to study the structures in nanometer scale. While the X-ray works better actually in Angstrom scale. Transmission Electron Microscope works very well from micron to angstrom scale, but TEM can only look at extreme small volume. But neutron can look at bulk material. So neutron is good at looking into nanostructure even in bulk.
The problem with neutron equipment is firstly they are all huge, secondly, they are slow. The new one at Oak Ridge is still huge, but very fast.
Re:Neutron Sources (Score:3, Insightful)