The first 10 years of the Bragg Institute 2002 - 2012 Cover image: Laue Diffraction image from NiAl shape-memory alloy taken on the KOALA Laue Diffractometer Th e fir st 1 0 ye ar s of th e B ra gg In st itu te 2 00 2 - 2 01 2 | 1 2 | Introduction Adi Paterson 4 ANSTO: A supportive centre of excellence in beam-line instruments and their applications for the 21st century Helen Garnett 9 Bragg Institute 10th birthday John White 11 Origins of the ANSTO Bragg Institute Brian O’Connor 13 Reflections on 10 years with the Bragg Institute Rob Robinson 14 Bragg’s Law: 100 years on and still going strong John Jenkin 18 The first five years Margaret Elcombe 21 ANBUG and the Bragg Institute Chris Ling 26 Bragg Institute 10th anniversary Oliver Kirstein 27 Taiwan and the Bragg Institute Rob Robinson and Wen-Hsien Li 28 The world of WOMBAT Andrew Studer 33 Laue diffraction on Koala Alison Edwards 35 Ten years of sample environments at the Bragg Institute Paolo Imperia, Scott Olsen and Stewart Pullen 36 A Gumtree retrospective Nick Hauser 39 Motofit Andrew Nelson 41 The characterisation of biomolecules project and the birth of the National Deuteration Facility Peter Holden 44 Food science Elliot Gilbert 47 Energy materials research at the Bragg Institute Vanessa Peterson 50 Thin film magnetism at the Bragg Institute David Cortie and Frank Klose 52 Table of contents | 3 Structure and properties of technetium compounds with magnetic ordering Gordon Thorogood, Brendan Kennedy and Max Avdeev 54 Reflecting on neutron studies of organic optoelectronics devices Arthur Smith, Ian Gentle and Michael James 56 Modern diffraction methods for the investigation of thermo-mechanical processing Klaus-Dieter Liss 59 The Bragg Institute, ANSTO and Australia’s overseas synchrotron programs Richard Garrett 64 The OPAL Neutron Beam Facility and the Neutron Beam Instruments Project (1997-2007) Shane Kennedy and Rob Robinson 66 The Neutron Beam Expansion Program (2009-2013) Frank Klose and Paris Constantine 72 Bragg Institute and the International Atomic Energy Agency Joseph Bevitt and Herma Büttner 74 A vision for the future Rob Robinson 77 Appendices: 1. Timeline 79 2. Bragg Institute Advisory Committee 81 3. Beam Instruments Advisory Group (2000-2007 and 2009-2013) 82 4. Program Advisory Committee 83 5. Theses containing data from Bragg Institute facilities (2002-2012) 84 6. Publications (2002-2012) 88 7. Indicators for Bragg Institute (2002-2012) 123 4 | QUOKKA and OPAL’s neutron guide hall 2010 Th e fir st 1 0 ye ar s of th e B ra gg In st itu te 2 00 2 - 2 01 2 | 5 It is a great pleasure to introduce this wonderful compilation of the achievements of the Bragg Institute during its first 10 years, told by the people who were involved in developing the Institute from its very beginnings. In 2013, ANSTO is celebrating its 60th anniversary. The achievements of our organisation over the past six decades have been bolstered tremendously by the many successes of our Bragg Institute. ANSTO’s Bragg Institute has established itself as one of Australia’s most significant scientific user platforms, with seven operating neutron beam instruments having been successfully constructed and commissioned, with a further six instruments under development. The Institute has also established a world-leading National Deuteration Facility that supports specialised research based on the distinct neutron scattering from hydrogen and deuterium. Researchers from 137 Australian and international research organisations have used the neutron beam instruments over the past 10 years, with over a thousand research articles being published in a range of high-quality journals. Enabled by OPAL, one of the world’s most modern research reactors, Bragg is well placed to continue to support research for many more decades to come. I trust you will enjoy the individual stories of the people behind developing, installing and running the instruments. They have shared their achievements, challenges and insights for the exciting future that is ahead for the Bragg Institute. I wish to extend my appreciation to our users and collaborators for their ongoing support. Although it is sometimes inappropriate to single out individuals, I want to extend my personal thanks to Rob Robinson, who has built and steered the Institute over the first decade. I congratulate all of our people, both past and present, who have contributed to the success of the Bragg Institute. Dr Adi Paterson Chief Executive Officer Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation Foreword 6 | The Bragg Institute in 2010 The Bragg Day Out, Como Hotel, March 2003. Th e fir st 1 0 ye ar s of th e B ra gg In st itu te 2 00 2 - 2 01 2 | 7 Bragg’s Technical Support Group (L-R) Matt Bell, Merv Perry, Marty Jones, Alain Brule Showing Attorney General Philip Ruddock around in 2007 James Doutch experimenting on QUOKKA John Daniels doing electronic-field experiments on TASS at HIFAR 8 | We had to build a reactor to support world-class neutron beam science Rob Robinson, former CEO Helen Garnett and Bill Stirling Th e fir st 1 0 ye ar s of th e B ra gg In st itu te 2 00 2 - 2 01 2 | 9 The seed for the concept that Australia should be a centre of excellence in neutron and X-ray beam science was sown 10 years before the launch of the Bragg Institute in December 2002. In late 1992 the Research Reactor Review - sometimes known as the McKinnon Review - was launched. HIFAR was aging and its design and safety systems were unlikely to enable it to operate into the 21st century. The push for a new reactor was mounting. Also in 1992, the ‘Australian’ X-ray beamline project was launched at the Photon Factory in Japan. During the preparation of ANSTO’s submission to the McKinnon Review, which I led as the then Deputy Executive Director, multiple lines of evidence attested to the historic strength of Australian neutron scattering and its contribution to condensed-matter science: a strength that had been underpinned by a reactor and beam-line instruments that were once world class. By 1992, HIFAR was now old and the neutron beam instruments, while being renewed somewhat through the AINSE consortium, had to a large extent lost their usefulness and appeal to younger scientists. The action for both neutron and X-ray beam science was overseas: Australians had been forced to adopt suitcase science. Australia needed a new research reactor for its medical radioisotope supplies, but as the McKinnon Review progressed, my view firmed that an isotope reactor alone would be an inappropriate investment - we had to build a reactor to support world-class neutron beam science, one with multiple instruments and a cold source. We had to be able to support the soft-matter science in which Australia had considerable research effort and the emerging nanosciences. Our opponents, the antinuclear activists - were however claiming that neutron scattering had had its day and that synchrotrons with their X-ray beams could do it all. These claims did not resonate with the claims by eminent scientists within and outside ANSTO and international consultation just reaffirmed the complementarity: ideally Australia should have on-shore access to both a world-class research reactor and a quality synchrotron. Given the multipurpose nature of a research reactor, replacing HIFAR was ANSTO’s first priority - a synchrotron had to be a later goal. Following the release of the McKinnon Report in 1994 and through till 1997, the case for a replacement research reactor - OPAL - was painstakingly built with ANSTO’s stakeholders, with political parties and with the politicians. During this period, visits to leading neutron scattering institutes and synchrotron facilities around the globe were added onto my other overseas commitments as Chief Executive. An understanding of how the best facilities operated was gained: there needed to be dedicated teams with a focus on the instruments, the scientific disciplines they supported and the users - many of whom would, and should be from outside of ANSTO, whether in other research organisations, in universities or in industry. It became apparent that the ANSTO divisional approach - focused on ANSTO’s business would not be the correct model for a 21st century world-class user facility. But first we had to get the facility and all efforts had to be on achieving Federal Government commitment to a new research reactor. With the commitment to funding, announced on September 3 1997, the detailed planning for OPAL began, a Beam Facilities Consultative Group was established and a myriad of complementary processes were triggered - Environmental Impact Assessment, Public Works Committee review and more. With these processes satisfactorily completed, we were finally able to recruit staff to lead the neutron beam instrument project. After an international search, aided by the commitment of international colleagues, Dr Rob Robinson was recruited as the Leader of the Neutron Scattering and Synchrotron Radiation Research Group in 1999. By this time ANSTO staff were also supporting Australian synchrotron users, not only in Japan but also at the Advanced Photon Source in the USA and ANSTO staff were joining with other scientists in Australia to promote a synchrotron as a facility that should be considered for funding in the next Major National Research Facilities (MNRF) funding round. I gave talks to the numerous groups, including the ANSTO: A supportive centre of excellence in beam-line instruments and their applications for the 21st century Helen Garnett PSM (ANSTO CEO at the time the Institute was formed) 10 | Australian Vice Chancellors group, Commonwealth Committees and briefed the then Minister for Science Nick Minchin on the complementarity of the reactor and a synchrotron. Early in 2000 the Federal Government announced that there would be a competitive process for funding large scientific facilities through a Major National Research Facilities round, with decisions in 2001. Quietly I saw the opportunity to achieve my vision for an Australian synchrotron co-located with the new research reactor at Lucas Heights. With the tendering process for the new research reactor almost complete, effort swung to convincing the New South Wales Government to support a bid for the synchrotron at Lucas Heights. The New South Wales Government had been quietly supportive of the new research reactor project and its potential contribution to make New South Wales a scientific centre of excellence. It seemed reasonable to believe they would be supportive of the concept to make Lucas Heights an even bigger player in national and international science - but it would take a commitment of significant funding from the state and support from scientists in other jurisdictions that were not likely to compete. Thus began a series of discussions with key players including Professor Brian O’Connor from Western Australia. We were all unanimously of the view that any facility at Lucas Heights would need to be distinguished from ANSTO’s own business. With a concept in mind we achieved a meeting with senior NSW officials in April 2000. While emphasising our vision for the two facilities co-located at Lucas Heights and how it could be ‘the’ place, Brian came out with the suggestion that an appropriately distinguished name was the Bragg Institute, named after Australia’s first Nobel Laureate, William Lawrence Bragg. The NSW Government did eventually agree to support a NSW bid for the synchrotron at Lucas Heights and a detailed submission prepared. However, with the decision by the Victorian Government to build the Australian Synchrotron, the concept of the Bragg Institute being ‘the’ name of the Neutron Scattering and Synchrotron Radiation Research Group at ANSTO retained momentum. There was support external to ANSTO and within ANSTO. There was no doubt in my mind that the group had to be separated from Physics Division and given the direct responsibility for project managing the instruments for the new reactor and building ANSTO’s partnerships, and reputation, with the neutron beam user community. Discussions were held with the Director, Physics Division, who was then on secondment to the IAEA in Vienna. With his understanding, the concept was put to the ANSTO Board during 2002. And so in October 2002, the announcement was made that the Bragg Institute would be launched later that year. Since December 2002, the team, led by Rob Robinson has built on its excellent work in the years 1999-2002 and Australian science has benefited significantly from the ingenuity and commitment of all associated with the Bragg Institute. Ten years is a long time in some ways - but a short time in the life of an institute aiming to be a world leader. Continued commitment to excellence and partnership will no doubt ensure that the second decade in the life of ‘the Bragg’ will build further on the vision sown back in 1992 - ANSTO hosting a world-class centre of excellence in neutron, and X-ray science. ANSTO: A supportive centre of excellence in beam-line instruments and their applications for the 21st century Helen Garnett PSM Birds-eye view of OPAL and the Neutron Guide Hall, behind it, during construction Th e fir st 1 0 ye ar s of th e B ra gg In st itu te 2 00 2 - 2 01 2 | 11 The Replacement Research Reactor (now called OPAL) funded by the Commonwealth Government in 1997 has placed Australia in the forefront of radioisotope production and nuclear technology in the Asia-Oceania region. The Bragg Institute, established in 2002 has done the same thing in neutron scattering science and technology. It is a pleasure for all who have benefited from the remarkable suite of instruments installed since then, to wish the Institute a very happy 10th birthday. ANSTO and the Australian scientific, engineering and medical communities now have at their disposal a landmark facility. What should be a scientific goal of this investment? A goal of the Asia-Oceanic Neutron Scattering Association (AONSA) is part of the answer: The gestation process for these facilities was long. The realisation in 1985 by Professor John Carver’s submission to the Australian Science, Technology and Engineering Council (ASTEC), that the Lucas Heights facilities were far behind those available in Europe and the United States in many areas, led to the first “suitcase scientists” doing work overseas not possible at home. The lack of a cold neutron source was of paramount concern since great advances in ‘soft matter’, polymer, colloid and biological sciences in Europe could not be matched in Australia. High respect is due to Australian ‘hard matter’ science with the diffraction instruments at the HIFAR reactor (Australia’s now retired research reactor). The Australian Academy of Science through the National Committee for Crystallography played a key role advising the Federal Government from 1990 onwards. My own vision of this project is that of a bipolar development of resources with our Asian neighbours. We must have a replacement reactor capable not only of the irradiation and isotope production needs of the next twenty or thirty years, but also one which will place Australia again (as in 1958) at the forefront in neutron scattering work for the foreseeable future - at least in some scientific and technological areas… …the desirability for eventual, if not immediate international collaboration and competition in the exploitation of central facilities. (John White in letter to Prof D.P.Craig President of AAS 15 October 1992) With the report of the Mackinnon Commission (1993) and the updated report to the Senate Review (1998) all of the struggles to install a cold source in the HIFAR reactor came to an end. A scientific brief for new neutron scattering instruments – developed over a number of years in close consultation with the Australian science community adopted a guiding principle along the lines: That no instrument should be constructed unless its performance could at least match the best overseas performance. This salutary challenge was taken up for reactor design and neutron instruments. It was a reasonable challenge for a new initiative to profit from the best of the many remarkable developments in neutron scattering technology overseas in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Thus optimised moderators, neutron beam guides and top of the mark detectors and monochromators were studied and incorporated. Bragg Institute 10th birthday John White, Australian National University That no instrument should be constructed unless its performance could at least match the best overseas performance 12 | The outcomes since 2005 show instrumentation performance of the highest international quality and illustrate how well the Australian designers and overseas constructors have responded. A second feature of the design was that the reactor beam hole configuration should allow a future second cold source and neutron guide hall for cold beam neutron instruments. The Bragg Institute is to be congratulated on having the first meeting (in 2012) to begin planning to realise this in the next ten years. Why is it important? In 2003-2004 the high attendance of user meetings, subsequent proposed demand, and international interest in small-angle scattering reflectivity and time-of-flight spectroscopy measure the quality of Australian and Asia-Oceania science needing these facilities. Complementarity of new Bragg instrumentation to new facilities in Asia-Oceania should be the watch- word for the next step at the Bragg Institute. Its international recognition through publications over the last five years and the scientific collaborations formed across the world point to this policy. Competitive provision for the Australian scientific community intersected with that of others in our region on a trading basis for access will produce a high contribution to the Australian national interest as has the provision of isotopes and nuclear expertise. The achievement over 20 years can be as high as that of the Institut Laue Langevin in Europe. Bragg’s Law:100 Years On and Still Going Strong John Jenkin, La Trobe University Bragg Institute 10th Birthday John White, Australian National University Schematic diagram of the PELICAN time-of-flight spectrometer Th e fir st 1 0 ye ar s of th e B ra gg In st itu te 2 00 2 - 2 01 2 | 13 The ANSTO Bragg Institute was launched in December 2002 under the leadership of Dr Rob Robinson who had arrived at ANSTO in December 1999 to take up an appointment as Leader of the ANSTO Neutron Scattering and Synchrotron Radiation Research Group. Rob’s appointment came at a time of great strategic significance for Australian science, with ANSTO signing a contract with the Argentinian company INVAP S.E. on 13 July 2000 to design and construct the OPAL reactor; and with the Commonwealth of Australia calling for bids for siting an Australian synchrotron. The New South Wales (NSW) bid for hosting the synchrotron was led by Prof Helen Garnett, with the vision that there would be much merit in co-locating the new synchrotron and the planned replacement reactor. The vision was to develop a research entity at Lucas Heights which would optimise the very strong synergies between neutron scattering and synchrotron radiation applications. ANSTO’s initial engagement with NSW government officers on the NSW bid took place at a meeting in Sydney’s CBD in early 2001. Prof Garnett was accompanied by Dr Robinson and Prof Brian O’Connor of Curtin University of Technology who had chaired the ANSTO ‘Strategic Planning Committee on Neutron Beam Applications for the Future – Facilities for Australians’. At this meeting, a schematic design was presented to establish a national research institute at Lucas Heights which would serve as a focus for Australian research involving the use of neutron scattering and synchrotron radiation. The concept to call the institute the Bragg Research Institute was proposed at that meeting by Prof O’Connor. Regrettably, consideration of the NSW bid to host the synchrotron, along with bids from Queensland and the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), was abandoned by the Commonwealth when the Victorian Government announced in June 2001 that it would design and construct the synchrotron in Melbourne. Notwithstanding this development, ANSTO refined the Bragg Institute concept and subsequently decided that the neutron scattering operation for the OPAL reactor would be named the Bragg Institute. Since then the Bragg Institute has successfully led the development of world-competitive neutron scattering science in Australia, and has also given much impetus to Australian synchrotron radiation research. Origins of the ANSTO Bragg Institute Brian O’Connor, Curtin University First Meeting of Bragg Institute Advisory Committee in March 2003 – outside Building 58: left to right: Shane Kennedy, Richard Garrett, Rob Lamb, Evan Gray, Brian O’Connor, George Collins, Alan Leadbetter, Barry Muddle, Rob Robinson, Don Napper The Bragg Institute in 2006 14 | On 14th October 2002, ANSTO Chief Executive Officer, Helen Garnett, summoned the staff of ANSTO’s Physics Division to an “all-hands” meeting in the AINSE Auditorium. After 90 minutes, she announced the formation of the Bragg Institute, a new initiative for ANSTO, and the audience (or at least a large part of it) erupted into applause. Of course, some were saddened by the passing of the old ANSTO Physics Division, and openly wondered how a nuclear organisation could conceivably manage without one. But not the multi-disciplinary team of neutron scatterers! At the time, the Neutron Scattering and Synchrotron Radiation Group comprised around 40% of the Physics Division, though we were probably seen by some as the black sheep, hidden away behind HIFAR’s barbed-wire security fence. But with the OPAL construction project, the group had already started to grow substantially, in preparation for ANSTO’s new research reactor. I had known for some weeks previously that Helen was going to make this announcement, and had wondered for some time prior to that what would happen in the scenarios that Claudio Tuniz (who had hired me in 1999, while Director of Physics) would or would not return from a 3-year secondment to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. But I had not expected this particular idea. Anyway, I think that Helen must have been quite nervous on the day, as she spoke for well over an hour before getting to the main point – I kept thinking “Helen – please give them the punchline!”, as I knew what was coming. Change is never easy. But in the end, the reaction was quite benign. The next step was to decide which of the admin and support staff would come with us, and which would go with the accelerator group to the Environment Division. In the end, Kevin Morrison joined us as a business manager from ARI, Judy Penny continued to support us with procurements in the Neutron Beam Instruments Project, and we were lucky to get Cherylie Thorn as Group Secretary. The staff of the Australian Synchrotron Research Program also moved up to the complex of buildings and transportables that formed B58. We were not to be a “Division” in its own right, but rather were under the wing of the Materials Division, which was led by George Collins, and who represented us on the Senior Management Committee. This arrangement was dubbed the “umbilical chord”, reflecting the initial dependence and nurturing from Materials, but also the sense that we would eventually grow into an independent adult. We were and are eternally grateful to George Collins for his patient help and mentoring, which has persisted long after the umbilical was cut. It was a deliberate choice for us to be an “Institute” rather than a “Division”, and some ANSTO Board members were apparently concerned about the elitism that this implied. But it also reflected the much stronger emphasis on partnership with other organisations, and indeed our by-line was “ANSTO in Partnership”, reflecting ideas for a virtual institute spanning all of Australia, and covering both neutrons and synchrotron radiation. Another early task was to come up with a suitable logo for the Institute, and a competition was held amongst the staff. Eventually we selected an idea from Darren Goossens (then a postdoctoral fellow, but now at the Austalian National University), consisting of a large upper-case “B” for Bragg, but as a set of interfering circular waves, as in the classic Young’s Slits Experiment (see page 16). The colour and artwork were refined by ANSTO Communications, and we used it on our webpages, presentations and business cards for several years, until the Howard Government issued a decree banning such sub-branding and enforcing a regimen of strong and standardised Australian Government branding with the national coat of arms. At the time, we were organised into five groups, as shown below. Those staff in red were about to join us: Dehong Yu (from University of Western Australia, as instrument scientist for LONGPOL), and Andrew Nelson and Kia Wallwork as postdoctoral fellows. Of course, Andrew is now one of our leading soft-matter researchers, an instrument scientist for PLATYPUS, and a contributor to this book, while Kia is in a leadership position at the Australian Synchrotron in Melbourne. Vanessa Peterson, another contributor Reflections on 10 years with the Bragg Institute Rob Robinson Th e fir st 1 0 ye ar s of th e B ra gg In st itu te 2 00 2 - 2 01 2 | 15 to this volume, was in 2002 a graduate student based with us – after graduating she did a postdoc in the United States, before returning to us as a staff member on our powder-diffraction team. Twelve others are still with the Institute after 10 years of continuous service. Three of our staff from 2002 now work for the Australian Synchrotron, a number have leadership positions at other overseas neutron sources, and some have moved elsewhere within ANSTO. Another early task was to set up the Bragg Institute Advisory Committee. Helen was very keen on this idea, though surprisingly this approach has not been copied elsewhere within ANSTO, despite being common practice in other nuclear organisations overseas. The members of the committee are listed in Appendix 1, and Don Napper (Sydney University) was the inaugural chair. For most of the Institute’s life, at least when we have been managing tens of millions of dollars of capital programs, the Beam Instruments Advisory Group has also advised us, under the chair of Tony Klein (University of Melbourne) and later Dan Neumann (NIST). Finally, a third external committee, the Program Advisory Committee advises us on the allocation of neutron beam time and deuteration resources. The Program Advisory Committee came into existence once OPAL went critical in 2006, and includes representatives of the Australian Institute of Nuclear Science and Engineering, the Australian Neutron Beam Users Group and the National Science Council of Taiwan, along with a number of external ANSTO nominees. It has been chaired successively by Jill Trewhella (Sydney University), Calum Drummond (CSIRO) and Anton Middelberg (University of Queensland). Another key set of relationships have been with other parts of ANSTO. Of course, the Institute is co- located (joined at the hip) with Reactor Operations, and we occupy a common set of buildings, and have overlapping regulatory obligations. In fact, the Institute is completely and absolutely dependent on Reactor Operations for a reliable supply of both cold and thermal neutrons. In 2006, before OPAL went critical, Greg Storr (Head of Reactor Operations) and I negotiated a Service Level Agreement, delineating who is responsible for what and identifying key interfaces. This has worked reasonably well. The Institute has also had consistently strong scientific collaboration with ANSTO’s Materials Division, which then morphed into the Institute of Materials and Engineering Sciences, and has now been re-branded as the Institute of Materials Engineering. Finally, there is a large number of engineering, design and draughting staff seconded from ANSTO-Engineering into the Institute. Mostly this was short-term, but Alain Brule has been with us continuously since 2002. We have also drawn heavily from the talent pool in ANSTO’s excellent apprenticeship program, to source technicians. Of course, we also have important interactions with all the other parts of ANSTO, and we thank our colleagues in these divisions for all of their support over the past 10 years. A selection of key milestones in the Institute’s life so far is given in the appendices, and I would like to highlight a couple of important events in late 2005: the hosting of the 2005 International Conference on Neutron Scattering in Sydney; and the “Blue Mountains Workshop”, held at the Hydro Majestic Hotel in Medlow Bath immediately afterwards. Around 750 attendees came to ICNS2005, and it was the first time this meeting had been held outside of Europe, North America or Japan. We had the chance to highlight our science and aspirations, and to show our presence on the world stage. Overseas friends still reminisce about how they first came to Australia The data acquisition team With Lady Lucy Adrian and Stephen Bragg in Cambridge in 2007 16 | Neutron Scattering Leader: R Robinson R Robinson M M Elcombe S J Kennedy R B Knott G E Gadd L Cussen M James R Piltz W Klooster E Gilbert M Hagen J Schulz O Kirstein D Yu NBI Engineering Team S Kim A Brule G Horton R Moore T Noakes E Imamovic Post Docs C Garvey D Goossens D Sutton A Nelson J Connolly K Wallwork (ASRP Fellow) Students V Peterson P Smythe T Young Synchrotron Radiation Group Leader: R F Garrett R F Garrett D J Cookson G J Foran A Stampfl J Hester H Tong C Harland Scientific Operations Group Leader: B Hunter B Hunter P Baxter A Studer Yang Fei N Hauser M Prior P Hathaway M TranC Technical Support Group Leader: D Penny D Penny M Perry M Jones M Bell Business Management Support Group Leader: K Morrison Business Manager: K Morrison Assistant Business Manager: J A Penny Admin. Assistant: C Thorn Admin Support (ASRP) M Edmondson Bragg Institute Leader – Rob Robinson Bragg Institute Organisational Chart from March 2003, including secondments from ANSTO-Engineering. Staff who were about to join us are listed in red. Th e fir st 1 0 ye ar s of th e B ra gg In st itu te 2 00 2 - 2 01 2 | 17 for this meeting, and it even influenced some of our present staff to join us. The Blue Mountains Workshop really set our course for expansion, and the vision produced there has been realised to a great extent with the Neutron Beam Expansion Project, described by Frank Klose and Paris Constantine later in this book. A number of leaders from other neutron sources, including Thom Mason (Oak Ridge), Winfried Petry (Munich) and Feri Mezei (Berlin) attended. In fact we are also grateful to all of our friends and colleagues in other neutron and synchrotron sources around the world. In part this is because, collectively, our staff have had the privilege of working at almost all of the leading centres in Europe and the USA, prior to joining ANSTO, and therefore retain strong networks around the world. We are particularly grateful to our friends at NIST, for their tireless advice, help and mentoring, and at the Institut Laue Langevin in Grenoble (with its large cadre of Australian crystallographers, and huge effort in advancing neutron technology), but in truth we have benefitted from advice, technology transfer and ideas from all of the leading international centres. We like to think that we are now giving something back, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region, and to NECSA in South Africa, and we are proud that we are now seen as a significant player in the world-wide “neutron family.” Finally, we have been privileged to have had some direct contact with the Bragg family, after whom we are named. Initially, the contact was through Prof. Tony Kelly, Lawrence Bragg’s last graduate student in the physical sciences, whom I met at a conference in Sydney in 2006 He introduced me to Lawrence’s eldest son Stephen, and to his niece Lady Lucy Adrian, a granddaughter of William Henry Bragg. My wife and I were privileged to have dinner with them in Cambridge in 2007, and our library now features a letter written to us by Stephen Bragg. Of course, the Australian research community was well aware that 2012 would be the centenary of “Bragg’s Law” for X-ray diffraction from crystals, which applies in exactly the same way to neutron and electron diffraction. In order to celebrate this, in December 2012, we helped to organise a special Centenary Meeting in Adelaide, Lawrence Bragg’s birthplace, involving other members of the family and scientific leaders from around the world. The background to this is beautifully described in John Jenkins’s article in this book. But it is a happy confluence of events that we celebrate the Bragg Institute’s tenth birthday, just as Australia celebrates its first Nobel Prize, awarded to the great physicists after whom we are named, and in whose footsteps we still tread. The 2005 International Conference on Neutron Scattering in Sydney 18 | Introduction On 11 November 1912, (William) Lawrence Bragg announced his discovery of Bragg’s Law and his solution of the first crystal structure. These discoveries have led to the electronic and computer revolution, the analysis of the rocks brought back from the moon, the current revolution in medical science, and much else besides. In celebrating its 2012 centenary, we should acknowledge Lawrence Bragg as one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century and one of Australia’s greatest sons. Lawrence Bragg is also still the youngest person ever to win a Nobel Prize: for Physics in 1915 with his father. At its jubilee, Lawrence delivered the first Nobel Guest Lecture at the 1965 Nobel ceremonies in Stockholm, and he began as he had done innumerable times before: “It is sometimes said that my father and I started X-ray analysis together, but actually that was not the case”; and he went on to point out that, as a research student at Cambridge, he alone had first analysed the Laue photographs using a reflection model, that he alone had devised Bragg’s Law, and that he alone had thereby determined the first crystal structures, of zincblende (ZnS) and the alkali halides. The journey to Bragg’s Law Late in 1885, persuaded by his Cambridge friend and tennis partner J.J. Thomson, William Henry Bragg applied for the vacant Elder Chair of Mathematics and Experimental Physics in the University of Adelaide. At the interviews, a committee of which Thomson was Chairman, selected William. Aged just 23, he had graduated BA with first class honours in mathematics, but he had never devised a university course nor taught in one, and he had done no research. On his first day in Adelaide, William was taken to meet the senior scientist in the colony, Charles Todd and his family; but it was their third daughter, Gwendoline, that caught his eye. They fell in love, were married three years later, and three children were subsequently born in Adelaide: Lawrence in 1890, then Robert (Bob), and later a daughter, Gwendy. Bragg’s Law: 100 years on and still going strong John Jenkin, La Trobe University The Bragg family in Adelaide, circa 1902, (L to R) Lawrence, Gwendoline, Bob and William (Courtesy, Dr S.L. Bragg) Th e fir st 1 0 ye ar s of th e B ra gg In st itu te 2 00 2 - 2 01 2 | 19 William’s teaching, public lectures and research slowly blossomed, and he became a world authority on the alpha-particles from radioactive decay. This was followed by an investigation of the nature of X- and gamma-radiation, in which he suggested, in contrast to most European scientists, that it was composed of neutral particles. Lawrence and Bob were educated at St Peter’s College in Adelaide, where Lawrence was promoted to higher and higher grades; he was just 14 years old in the sixth form with other students aged 17 and 18. This unhappy disjunction continued at the university, where he studied in his father’s office and where he topped most of his classes, many taught by his father. He graduated BA at age eighteen, with first-class honours in mathematics, only weeks before the family sailed for England: William to the physics chair at Leeds, Lawrence to further mathematics at Cambridge. A year later, encouraged by his father, Lawrence changed to physics and again graduated with a first. He entered the Cavendish Laboratory but was disappointed by the research project J.J. Thomson offered him, and he happily joined the family on the Yorkshire coast for the summer holidays of 1912. Here, he and his father read a letter from Germany reporting the Laue experiment that showed that X-rays could be diffracted. But it was also clear that Laue’s analysis of the results was incomplete; he assumed that fluorescent radiation from a crystal of simple cubic geometry was responsible for the non- circular spots on the photographic plate. William returned to Leeds to try to salvage his particle model of X-rays; Lawrence returned to Cambridge to try and find a better explanation. Using insights provided by his undergraduate lectures and advice about possible crystal structures, Lawrence envisaged a reflection of the incident radiation from atoms in a face-centred-cubic structure, leading to elliptical diffraction spots that precisely reproduced the German data. He presented his findings to the Cambridge Philosophical Society, which soon published them. Lawrence then used his new understanding to discover the structures of several alkali halide crystals. Using a crystal of known structure, father William now used the technique to study X-rays, until Rutherford in Manchester bullied him out of it in favour of Harry Moseley. William then turned his new spectrometer to the study of crystals, and father and son, together and separately, plundered the new field. Lawrence recalled, “we had a wonderful time … discovering a new goldfield where nuggets could be picked up on the ground … until the war stopped our work together”. Lawrence’s subsequent career It was now 1915 and The Great War was in full swing. For more than four years, close to the front line, Lawrence developed the science of ‘sound-ranging’ to locate the big German guns, and in 1917 and 1918 this played a major role in the drive for Allied victory in the First World War, a story still to be adequately told. Lawrence Bragg should be acknowledged as a war hero as well as a superb scientist! Here we may simply note that in 1915 the family’s Nobel Prize could not be celebrated: because of the war and because his brother Bob and Lawrence’s closest friend had both been killed. His father’s internationalism was damaged, his mother’s mourning was deep and long lasting, and Lawrence’s equanimity was threatened by the horrors of the Western Front. Appointed post-war to Rutherford’s Manchester chair, Lawrence suffered a nervous breakdown, overcome when his research blossomed, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society and he married the bubbly Alice Hopkinson. Lawrence Bragg, Cambridge research student, circa 1913, soon after his discovery of Bragg’s Law and his invention of X-ray crystallography (Courtesy, Dr S.L. Bragg) 20 | Lawrence’s research resumed. He and his ‘Manchester School’ began a long and successful program to determine the structures of silicate minerals, he wrote a new book, The Crystalline State, and he launched a new study of metals, alloys, and alloy phase diagrams. In a lecture to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1935, he mentioned the attraction of “an X-ray investigation of structures produced by living matter”, and that it might be “the most interesting field of all”. In 1937 Lawrence again succeeded Rutherford, this time in the Cavendish chair at Cambridge, where the reception was again cool. Many said a crystallographer wasn’t a real physicist at all! But again Lawrence triumphed. As Brian Pippard said later, “when one looks back on Bragg’s tenure … [it] came to fruition in advances … that even eclipsed any from Rutherford’s Cavendish”. He was no doubt thinking of the Nobel Prizes awarded to Crick, Watson, Kendrew and Perutz in 1962, and later to Ryle. Finally, Lawrence Bragg accepted another poisoned chalice at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London, where he reorganised its dysfunctional administration, introduced successful lectures for school children, gave discourses that were televised for the first time, and saw his research blossom yet again. He died on the first of July 1971. Conclusion The Braggs took science to the public, they supported schoolteachers and schoolchildren, they recruited women staff and female research students, and, above all, they breached the traditional academic boundaries, taking X-ray crystallography into chemistry, geology, biology, agriculture, materials science and medicine and much, much more. Lawrence Bragg rebuilt the physics departments at Manchester and Cambridge and rescued the Royal Institution in London, all against severe opposition, and history has judged him kindly in all three cases. He was surely one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century. With his father he influenced a wider range of disciplines more profoundly than anyone else, and their achievements transformed our understanding of both the natural and the man- made worlds. He should be especially remembered and honoured on the centenary of his initial, pivotal discovery. References For further details of the Bragg story, see John Jenkin, William and Lawrence Bragg, Father and Son (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008hb, 2011pb). For Lawrence, see Sir David Phillips, “William Lawrence Bragg, 1890-1971”, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 25, 1979, pp. 75-143. Bragg’s Law:100 Years On and Still Going Strong John Jenkin, La Trobe University John Jenkin, author of “William and Lawrence Bragg, Father and Son” The Braggs took science to the public, they supported schoolteachers and schoolchildren Th e fir st 1 0 ye ar s of th e B ra gg In st itu te 2 00 2 - 2 01 2 | 21 The formation of the Bragg Institute was the time when neutron scattering ‘came-of-age’ at ANSTO, no longer an add-on to the Materials or Physics Divisions. When formed, the Bragg Institute had two main teams, those involved with the HIFAR instruments (instrument scientists, technicians) and those involved in designing the first eight instruments for OPAL (lead scientists who got to go around the world to see what everyone else was doing and determine current ‘World’s best practice’, engineers and draftsmen seconded from ANSTO Engineering) under the Head (Rob Robinson) and Technical Leader (Shane Kennedy). In typical fashion, the number of people outgrew the building (Building 58) very quickly, so a large annexe was assembled out the front to house them. When the Australian Synchrotron project staff joined us, even that was not enough and a second annexe was added out the back to accommodate them along with the increasing number of post-docs based with us. Managing the transition from HIFAR to OPAL was well under way when the Bragg Institute was formed. There were five, soon to be seven operational instruments and all had recently been upgraded to ensure successful operation until HIFAR shut down. Some noisy detectors on the HRPD had been replaced (better quality data), a pneumatic shutter had been installed on the Medium-Resolution Powder Diffractometer (MRPD) (lower radiation dose to users), AUSANS had some new ancillary equipment (sample changer, Couette cell, sample temperature control) and improved software, LONGPOL had a supermirror polariser and 8 analysers and 2TanA had been given a motor upgrade with new driver software following irreparable failure of the old system. Two new instruments were ready to roll. The Triple-Axis Spectrometer (1970 vintage) had been converted to a strain scanner (TASS) to give the staff experience in residual-stress measurement and possibly encourage industrial users into the neutron field. An initially modest, but finally quite sophisticated, reflectometer had been constructed, some initial data had been collected and it was awaiting safety approval before commencing operation. It achieved five intensity decades of fringes from simple systems and allowed scientists to develop processing programs for the data. It was also planned to use it for testing supermirror guide sections during their production for the new era, although this did not actually happen: they were fully tested overseas. Sample-environment equipment was adequate but becoming unreliable and difficult to maintain (lack of parts and expertise). New ancillaries were being purchased, but they had to comply with the new standards to allow them to be transferred to OPAL instruments. Where possible new techniques were being tested on the HIFAR instruments before being approved. Examples were:- the mounting for focussing monochromators for the powder instruments, trial of a small area detector for single- crystal data collection, the use of image plates and the testing of remote computer control of equipment on a simulated dance floor in B42. In anticipation of a much higher throughput of experiments, a computer- based scheduling system was already on line. Users could see the schedule from ‘outside’ and keeping track of who used which instrument for what proposal became a lot easier. The experience with this made evolution into the current database much smoother. The users were students, post docs, research scientists, whoever could get approval, getting as much data from the HIFAR instruments before the reactor was shut down. Students with theses to complete were given higher priority as we approached shut down. In 2003 both TASS and the reflectometer received their first external users. Significant promotional activities were started (the new instruments were planned to be ~10x more powerful than the current ones). As a result there was a significant increase in demand from the Australian Institute of Nuclear Science and Engineering (AINSE) (proposals up 16%, usage up 28% and 14 new researchers), and ANSTO’s Institute of Materials and Engineering Sciences was making good use of TASS. Availability of other instruments ~87%. The first five years Margaret Elcombe For four years the HIFAR instruments were run almost non-stop 22 | In 2004 a new instrument was commissioned. This was an X-ray reflectometer, to complement the neutron-reflectometer and was the first instrument operational in B82 (in an instrument cabin off the neutron guide hall). It was well used form the start. Neutron instrument availability was ~80%. In 2005 there was a significant shift in emphasis to operations only (reduced technical effort) plus continued efforts to increase demand. Attempts to run LONGPOL at a shorter wavelength were aborted and it ran for the rest of its life at 3.6Å. Neutron instrument availability was ~90%.The 7 Tesla cryomagnet, received the previous year was finally commissioned both in the workshop and on the MRPD. A second X-ray instrument (SAXS) was commissioned in August and was also very busy from the start. Customer numbers and usage continued to increase. There was significantly greater use of the user feedback system and the ratings also improved. Users for OPAL were going to come from a much wider market than for HIFAR, which was still predominantly AINSE. To prepare for this change in users (adding ANSTO, ANSTO collaborators, and international researchers to the existing AINSE user base) a review system for the non-AINSE proposals commenced. In 2006 activities started slowing down. LONGPOL ceased operation in March and 2TanA in June. The remaining instruments ran right up to the end. In April 2006, we found time to vacate Building 58, which had been the home to neutron scattering for ~35 years, and relocate to the new Bragg Institute building (B87). Laboratory facilities were relocated to OPAL’s Neutron Guide Hall, with some user space temporarily located in B42, next to HIFAR. The end of the HIFAR era came on January 30 2007, when the Minister for Education, Science and Training, Julie Bishop pressed the button to initiate HIFAR’s final shut down. In the 40 years I worked there, neutron scattering grew from four single-detector un-computerised instruments (data accumulated on rolls of paper tape and had to be taken to the site mainframe computer for processing) to seven highly sophisticated, computer controlled, instruments using single detectors, multidetectors or area detectors as appropriate, with an approximate 16-fold improvement in data-collection times. There was also a nine-month decommissioning plan for all the neutron instruments inside HIFAR. As soon as practical after the shutdown, all re-useable items were removed from the HIFAR building and The First Five Years Margaret Elcombe Construction of the Bragg Institute building Th e fir st 1 0 ye ar s of th e B ra gg In st itu te 2 00 2 - 2 01 2 | 23 transferred into storage. 2TanA found a new home in the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. Much later, months after the shutdown, when components had cooled down, I went back into HIFAR with the active handling crew and radiation survey worker to remove all the useable monochromators - large single crystals - from their shielding and transfer them across to storage in OPAL’s Reactor Beam Hall. Some of them have since been used. Ongoing throughout these years was the issue of licensing the new instruments with the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA). At last, we had the chance to be our own master and not be licensed as part of the reactor. Preparing the submission to ARPANSA for this option (which involved going quite deeply into how the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety (ARPANS) Act was framed) took a while, and getting approval took even longer. Having jumped that hurdle we then had to put it into practice, prepare documents for our operational practices, radiation safety, radioactive waste management and make sure the quality system for the Institute was up-to- date. While there was going to be a single licence for all the instruments, each one required its own set of documents and safety approval prior to cold commissioning. A new innovation (for us) was a Safety Interlock System to prevent personnel from being within any instrument enclosure when the beam was on. This was necessary because the thermal neutron fluxes were going to be an order of magnitude higher than in HIFAR and there would be general access to the Neutron Guide Hall. Initial ARPANSA approval was for hot commissioning only and operating approval was only granted once all the conditions had been met (predominantly that the radiation levels were acceptable). This two stage approval had not been envisaged originally. There are now two licenses, one for hot commissioning and a second for operation. First access to the new buildings occurred in 2004. The new buildings were still ‘under construction’, so suddenly all staff with legitimate access needs had to have construction site licences and many of us dogging licences as well. The technicians needed access to set up the new workshop and the scientists to get ready for instrument components to arrive. We were even supplied with a controlled turnstile in the back fence to save the long walk round via the guard house. The first instruments installed there were not for neutrons but for X-rays, an X-ray Reflectometer (2004) and a Small Angle X-ray machine (2005). So even before the Neutron Guide Hall came into use designated room purposes were changed. The contrast between the cramped conditions in the single HIFAR building containing the reactor and all seven neutron beam instruments and the huge warehouse-like initially empty Neutron Guide Hall at OPAL was staggering. At HIFAR, neutron scattering equipment was allocated 58 per cent of the main floor level along with an added mezzanine floor level for instrument control and storing sample-environment equipment. No longer was the instrument shielding design dictated by the ability to get it into position (AUSANS being the last and hardest to get in). The new instruments were designed for optimum performance including low radiation background levels. Slowly OPAL’s Neutron Guide Hall filled up. The guides were installed, with their shielding and monochromator shields, the dance floors laid, neutron instruments installed, much wiring done, computing control programs written and tested, Safety Interlock System installed and tested…. Everything you can think of for a single instrument times eight! A very busy time for all. So busy in fact that we could not get all the licences approved at the same time. There was some natural variation in the status of each instrument, dictated by the arrival of components. However to use the staff expertise as efficiently as possible it was also necessary to stagger actions round the instruments, completing an action (eg wiring, safety check) on one instrument before moving on to the next. Eventually OPAL went critical (in August 2006) and finally produced sufficient neutrons for hot commissioning to start. Primary shutter open, radiation survey, secondary shutter open, radiation survey, instrument shutter open, radiation survey, increase power level and repeat – you get the picture. Slowly we worked up to full power. The first pattern was from ECHIDNA (in December 2006). Two months later (February 2007) we watched a full powder pattern from magnesium oxide build up on WOMBAT’s computer screen in a couple of minutes. It was exciting. It worked. Then started the long haul of calibrations, detector efficiency calculations, aligning monochromators etc., before first publications were submitted to journals, later that year. 24 | Installation of QUOKKA’s vacuum vessel Collaboration with colleagues in New Zealand on magnets and magnetism (2005) Th e fir st 1 0 ye ar s of th e B ra gg In st itu te 2 00 2 - 2 01 2 | 25 Skating on Air, with AZ-Systèmes in Grenoble Saurabh Kabra, Neeraj Sharma and Dehong Yu Chief Scientist Penny Sackett, visiting in 2009, with Tony Irwin, Rob Robinson and Adi Paterson 26 | The Australian and New Zealand Neutron Beam Users Group (ANBUG) has always had a close working relationship with the Bragg Institute. Although ANBUG in some sense exists in opposition to Bragg, as an independent body representing the users with a duty to criticise (or praise) the facilities, the fortunes of the two have been intimately linked over the years. From its establishment in 1979 up until around 1993, ANBUG worked in a coordinated manner with the Physics Division of ANSTO to keep neutron science in the forefront of the scientific political arena. Acting as an independent body, it provided documentation to government agencies and review processes with a view to enhancing facilities at HIFAR. However, by the mid-90’s, ANBUG was dwindling as HIFAR was falling increasingly far behind major overseas neutron facilities. The decision of the Australian Government in the late 1990s to fund OPAL and establish the Bragg Institute led directly to a revival of ANBUG’s membership, in response to which a new ANBUG constitution was established in 2001. One of the first acts of this revived form of ANBUG was to successfully bid, together with the Bragg Institute, to host the International Conference on Neutron Scattering in Sydney in 2005. In the intervening period, corresponding to the design and construction phase of OPAL, ANBUG made many submissions to the project in direct support of the Bragg Institute and played an important role in its various Instrument Advisory Teams. Now that OPAL is fully operational, the relationship has returned to a more oppositional mode, but almost always to mutually benefit – happy users being more likely to return to the facility. A strong spirit of cooperation continues, exemplified in our recent successful joint bid to host the 2nd Asia- Oceania Conference on Neutron Scattering (AOCNS) in 2015, and we have no doubt that this will continue as ANBUG and the Bragg Institute grow in parallel. ANBUG and the Bragg Institute Chris Ling, Australian Neutron Beam Users Group Th e fir st 1 0 ye ar s of th e B ra gg In st itu te 2 00 2 - 2 01 2 | 27 Congratulations to all current and previous members of the Bragg Institute, established in 2002. Transforming a scientific construction project into an operating user facility that is amongst the leaders in the world is a tremendous achievement, and everyone who was part of the initial project, the transition period into and finally the operations phase should not only be congratulated but also proud of either having been or being part of something special. Having the opportunity to reflect two years after leaving the Institute I experienced from its early beginnings until 2011, allowed me to recap what joining ANSTO Physics and the Neutron Beam Instruments Project in 2002 meant for me – in no particular order - • Exciting opportunity to work in a different country… • Fear of the unknown… • How do I keep up some form of scientific work in parallel to running an instrument construction project… • Growing together and becoming more than a team but rather some form of family… • Experiencing people leave and colleagues grow… • Proud of the opening ceremony when Prime Minister, John Howard inaugurated OPAL… • Being one of only three instrument scientists who saw an instrument project like KOWARI go through all the phases from conceptual design up to commissioning and operations… • Becoming one of the first staff members of the Bragg Institute… • What will the future bring for me and my family in a foreign country… It is a matter of life and growing up that one goes through different phases such as excitement, frustration, or even resignation at certain points. For me, being in the meantime responsible for my own group, the most valuable lesson I learned while being at the Bragg Institute was not so much related to running projects, but rather acknowledging the fact that the person offering a job takes as big a risk as the person taking it; I am grateful that I was trusted and that I had the opportunity to be part of an exciting journey. I hope that I will be able to apply what I learned while working with you at the Bragg Institute. Recently, I had the opportunity to return to Australia and I was intrigued to see all the activities in the Neutron Guide Hall, the users on the different instruments and how the Institute has grown and transformed. I am certain that the Bragg Institute will continue to be recognised for its activities in neutron scattering, and even more once the instruments that are currently being part of the NBI-2 project become available to the user community. I wish my colleagues all the best for the years to come, and I am looking forward to congratulating, and maybe even celebrating, the Bragg Institute’s 20th anniversary in another ten years’ time. Bragg Institute 10th anniversary Oliver Kirstein, European Spallation Source, Lund, Sweden I am grateful that I was trusted and that I had the opportunity to be part of an exciting journey 28 | One of the major successes of the Institute has been the involvement of the National Science Council of Taiwan (NSC) in the neutron beam program at OPAL, via its investment in the state-of-the-art cold-neutron 3-axis spectrometer, SIKA. Construction of SIKA was managed by the National Central University, under the leadership of Prof. Wen-Hsien Li, and user operations will commence in 2013, under the auspices of the National Synchrotron Radiation Research Centre in Hsinchu. At the time of writing in November 2012, SIKA has its commissioning licence and has received its first neutrons. Initially, it is using thermal neutrons, pending the return to service of OPAL’s cold source. The capital investment amounts to in excess of $8M, and the National Science Council is committed to placing four instrument scientists, along with one administrative assistant, and in return the Taiwan research community receives access to 70% of the beam time on the instrument, which may be spread over the full portfolio of neutron beam instruments at OPAL. In practice, the Taiwan research community is represented on the OPAL Program Advisory Committee, and participates in the normal user program, just like everyone else. Any discrepancies, and there haven’t been many, are dealt with through Directors Discretionary time. The net result is that the Taiwan research community comprises the largest single overseas user community at OPAL, ahead of New Zealand and the United States, which are next. The Taiwan involvement with the Institute results from plans to replace the Taiwan Research Reactor, which operated from 1973 to 1988, with the TRR-II Reactor. TRR-II was to be a 20-MW research reactor with cold source and an initial set of four instruments: powder diffraction, reflectometry, small-angle scattering and triple-axis, but the project was cancelled in August 2001. At that point, TRR-II’s international advisory committee advised Taiwan to build an instrument at another neutron source in the Asia-Pacific region. Ultimately, this thinking led to the SIKA instrument at OPAL. The first contact between ANSTO and these activities was when Rob Robinson was invited to attend a Workshop on Neutron and X-Ray Scattering: Applications to Biological and Industrial Problems in October 2001. Various other exchanges occurred thereafter, and a key player was Prof. Kuan-Ching Lee, who was seconded from the National Central University to the Taiwan Economic and Cultural Office in Canberra. The first Taiwan visit to ANSTO took place in early September 2003, and given that ANSTO was already committed to building high-performance versions of the four instruments envisaged for TRR-II, we converged on the idea of building a second 3-axis spectrometer using OPAL’s cold neutrons. This was a sensible move for the whole facility, played to Taiwan’s strengths and could easily be implemented on the CG-4 beam tube. The Chairman of NSC, Dr. Wei Che-Ho, visited ANSTO, including the OPAL construction site, in March 2004. This was followed up by another visit from Wen- Hsien Li and Kuan-Ching Lee in May 2004, at which the basic deal for the construction and operation of SIKA, and benefit to Taiwan users, was thrashed out. Of course this was very much in line with standard practice for such investments at neutron sources and synchrotrons around the world. Another year of negotiation, mainly over the particular use of words, resulted in a formal ‘Arrangement’ which was signed on 8th June 2005, and a subsidiary ‘Services Agreement’ between ANSTO and National Central University in March 2006. With funding lined up, Peter Vorderwisch, who had recently retired from the Hahn-Meitner Institute in Berlin, after building and operating the FLEX instrument there, was engaged as a consultant and worked tirelessly at Lucas Heights for several years to assist in designing a state-of-the-art Taiwan and the Bragg Institute Rob Robinson and Wen-Hsien Li The Taiwan research community comprises the largest single overseas user community at OPAL Th e fir st 1 0 ye ar s of th e B ra gg In st itu te 2 00 2 - 2 01 2 | 29 instrument. Charlie Wu did most of the work from the Taiwan side, and was assisted by Eno Imamovic, who was engaged to work on the design. The monochromators and drum were closely modelled on the adjacent TAIPAN thermal 3-axis spectrometer, but a much more complicated and versatile secondary spectrometer, modelled on BT-7 at NIST, has been implemented, together with a much larger dance floor. ANSTO has also contributed in the form of a 3He polarisation system and cells for use on both SIKA and TAIPAN, and in the purchase of a 12-T vertical-field magnet and dilution refrigerator capable of reaching temperatures as low as 20mK. In parallel, there were also significant interactions between Australia and Taiwan in the use of synchrotron radiation, particularly at the Taiwan Photon Source at Hsinchu. In preparation for the domestic synchrotron, the Australian Synchrotron Research Program installed a soft X-ray end station there, under the leadership and project management of Anton Stampfl in the Bragg Institute. With the commissioning of the Australian Synchrotron in Melbourne, the end station moved to Victoria and Anton moved to Lucas Heights, in order to join our triple-axis team on TAIPAN. But Australian collaboration with the National Synchrotron Radiation Research Centre continues strongly. In summary, there has been a strong and growing collaboration between Australia and Taiwan, and particularly involving the Bragg institute, in the use of both neutrons and synchrotron X-rays, and this looks set to grow further in the coming decade. The Taiwan Connection 30 | Chris Ling president of ANBUG, awarding the ANBUG award for Neutron Science to Max Avdeev in 2011 Ordering Korean food at the first Asia-Oceania Conference on Neutron Scattering in 2011 High temperature Materials Science on KOWARI Th e fir st 1 0 ye ar s of th e B ra gg In st itu te 2 00 2 - 2 01 2 | 31 The 3He polarisation station built for us by the Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble Winning the Endeavour Award for Safety in 2007 Christmas with the Institute’s children on the beach Blue Mountains Workshop, December 2005 Dan Bartlett and the PELICAN triple monochomator 32 | High speed neutron powder diffraction isn’t something that can be taken for granted Many hands make WOMBAT: this photo, taken soon after ‘first neutrons’ with many of the people who contributed to its design and manufacture. Th e fir st 1 0 ye ar s of th e B ra gg In st itu te 2 00 2 - 2 01 2 | 33 An image of the first real-time experiment performed on WOMBAT: a lithium-ion battery discharge-charge cycle. This was a test experiment that yielded a beautiful dataset that was regularly used to show WOMBAT’s power, especially during the OPAL shutdown of 2008. The data were later used as the basis for an article published as Journal of Power Sources 195, 8258-8266 (2010). WOMBAT took its first diffraction pattern just after sunset on a day in early February 2007, a little less than five years after the beginning of the Bragg Institute. Margaret Elcombe, Vanessa Peterson and I watched the two dimensional diffraction pattern of magnesium oxide flash onto the screen seconds after having opened the beam. The MgO rod was a legacy of Margaret’s sample collection from the HIFAR triple-axis instrument. It was a large sample used as a calibration standard. Even so, the quarter of a million counts per second we watched aggregating into the diffraction pattern impressed us all. WOMBAT’s ancestor was the Medium Resolution Powder Diffractometer (MRPD) at HIFAR. With MRPD, if you saw a pattern in 15 minutes you were lucky. Within days of WOMBAT becoming operational, we became impatient with any sample that didn’t give a decent signal after 15 seconds. It was astonishingly easy to take the speed of one of the world’s fastest reactor neutron powder diffractometers for granted. High speed neutron powder diffraction isn’t something that can be taken for granted. It’s surprisingly rare. Some of the world’s reactor facilities have only a single powder diffractometer, usually designed for high resolution in the tradition of Alan Hewat’s design from the mid 1970’s. OPAL’s precedent was set at HIFAR with the two powder instruments there: when I arrived at ANSTO a few years BO (Before OPAL) there was MRPD, built by Shane Kennedy, and HRPD, built by Chris Howard and, at the time, operated by Brett Hunter. Powder diffraction was one of our strengths at the time, and so it wasn’t a surprise that two powder instruments featured in Shane’s earliest designs for the guide hall of the Replacement Research Reactor. But it was by no means a fait accompli. The plan survived the initial haggling over instrument priorities as a result of spirited and compelling representations from the Instrument Advisory Teams for ECHIDNA and WOMBAT. The legacy of Alan Hewat and Chris Howard meant that a high-resolution instrument was always on the cards, however it was the recent high- speed diffraction work of Erich Kisi’s group done at the D20 instrument at the ILL that pointed towards the future. WOMBAT was to be a high-speed high- intensity instrument, with a diverse target audience looking at real-time processes and complex sample environments. The building of the instrument really kicked off when Mark Hagen joined ANSTO. It was during his time that the instrument design came together and the most important procurement took place: the detector. A world-class instrument needs world-class components, and for a high-speed instrument, the detector is crucial. Mark was responsible (along with many others at ANSTO) for procuring the curved 120° detector from the Instrumentation Division at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and after Mark left it was my privilege to visit Brookhaven periodically and see Neil Schaknowski, Joe Mead and the rest of Graham Smith’s formidable team build and assemble a superb piece of neutron engineering. At the Sydney end, under the watchful project management of Michael Deura and, later on, Shane Harrison, a band of technicians put together a superb beamline. It’s unfair to highlight only a few, but I would mention Terry Noakes on design, Peter Baxter on integration and Mark New on fabrication for their vital contributions. Since ’first neutrons’ on that evening five and a half years ago, WOMBAT has proved itself to be a multidimensional instrument. We’ve done in-situ measurements examining batteries, clathrates and geological exchange reactions. We’ve looked at the high temperature performance of light metal alloys and the low temperature magnetic transitions in The world of WOMBAT Andrew Studer 34 | intermetallics. We’ve done high speed stroboscopic measurements of electroceramics. We’ve looked at Bragg and diffuse scattering from several single- crystal systems and done a dash of pair-distribution function analysis. We’ve gassed, squished, frozen, melted, heated, spun and magnetised. We’ve run about twenty different sample environments on WOMBAT, and in the near future will add polarisation to its capabilities. WOMBAT has proven to be a far broader instrument with a more diverse user base than originally foreseen. Friedl Bartsch and Andrew Studer in front of the WOMBAT detector WOMBAT’s role has broadened beyond its initial design specification for high-speed powder diffraction and now does experiments measuring texture, single crystal magnetism and diffuse scattering. This image shows diffuse scattering in a copper selenide single crystal. The World of WOMBAT Andrew Studer Th e fir st 1 0 ye ar s of th e B ra gg In st itu te 2 00 2 - 2 01 2 | 35 The 1912 report of the diffraction of X-rays by crystals occurred when both radiation and atoms were less well understood than at present. Indeed the report of diffraction of X-rays by a crystal was a fundamental proof of their wave-like properties. The interpretation of these diffraction images by Lawrence Bragg in terms of a set of atomic sites which when combined with symmetry operators comprise a ‘crystal structure’ proved the greatest single advance for chemistry in the 20th century. KOALA, the Laue diffractometer implemented at OPAL provides for single-crystal neutron diffraction experiments capable of filling in many of the blanks which X-ray diffraction, being due to electron density, could not. Hydrogen – the smallest element – is particularly ill-defined by X-ray diffraction, so many aspects of the chemistry of hydrogen remain to be defined within the structure-reactivity paradigm at the heart of modern chemistry. The incomplete understanding of hydrogen, in all its chemical combinations, is a significant gap in fundamental knowledge with important implications in many proposed commercial and industrial applications. Whilst having far broader application, the Koala diffractometer is now established as the instrument of choice for chemists seeking full understanding of the presence and potential reactivity of hydrogen in the compounds they seek to understand. Hydrides in potential catalyst materials: Hydride, H-, is frequently found in compounds prepared as potential catalysts or catalyst models for industrial chemical processes. Verifying absence or presence of hydride, and defining its structural properties when present, remain a challenge for workers in this area where Australia has several high- profile groups. A collaboration with a major group at RIKEN, in Japan, is also underway. Understanding the possibilities of hydride: Hydride is the smallest atomic anion and the prospect that it could be a key component in energy storage applications is well recognised. The absence of a sufficient data base of reliable structures from which a systematic understanding of hydride can be derived is a major deficit in attempts at rational process design. Collaboration with a Taiwanese group has to date demonstrated two new coordination modes for hydride and proved the presence of hydride in compounds where it is only a fraction of a per cent of the weight of the material yet is a key element in the material’s behaviour. Understanding the hydrogen bond: Hydrogen bonding is a strong force in intermolecular terms, but frequently, hydrogen positions and conclusions based on them are inferred from inherently inadequate X-ray data. Collaborations have been established in Australia, the UK and India which address this issue at a range of levels – from determining whether a hydrogen nucleus is located on one or another site where electron density is found (but where a pair of electrons may exist without forming a bond) through to detailed high-resolution mapping of electron density in X-ray studies by comparison with neutron diffraction derived nuclear site definition to prove whether an evident short contact between two atoms is accompanied by an electronic (bonding) interaction. Laue Diffraction on KOALA Alison Edwards KOALA and Alison EdwardsKOALA and Ross Piltz 36 | Sample environment is fundamental for a properly run user facility It is not often that neutron scattering experiments are performed under normal ambient conditions. Since the early days it was clear: to successfully run a user oriented facility at the same level as the best institutions worldwide, beside a suite of world-class neutron instruments, a good mix of equipment for sample environment is also necessary. Sample environment provides the equipment necessary to run experiments at very low or very high temperatures, under high gas or mechanical pressure, under a high magnetic field, a voltage or under a combination of the above or more. The sample environment group also provides solutions for specific experiments, for example, neutron scattering experiments done simultaneously with other techniques: optical techniques, gas sorption experiments etc... Early days Prior to the Bragg Institute forming, there was a small suite of sample environment equipment for use on the HIFAR instruments. This included a top-loading cryocooler and a bottom loading one, Eulerian cradles and 2 furnaces made in house by Merv Perry, the first technician dedicated to Sample Environment and working on this equipment since 1991. Of these, one Eulerian cradle, one bottom-loading cryofurnace and one in-house-built furnace are still in use today. Neutrons are particularly apt for research aimed at magnetic materials. It is not surprising then that the first purchase (in 2005) by the Bragg Institute was a 7-Tesla dry vertical-field cryomagnet funded via an Australian Research Council grant with substantial university co-investment, which is still in use today. It was one of the first cryogen-free (or ‘dry’) magnets, an innovative piece of equipment that has been extensively used despite its shortcomings: a small window, designed for HIFAR necessities, and high background. When the Neutron Beam Instruments project started in 2000, there was A$750,000 allocated for sample environment equipment. This was used to purchase an ILL-type 1700°C vacuum furnace, an ILL-type liquid-helium ‘orange cryostat’, and new bottom- loading cryofurnaces, one of which was dedicated to the 7T vertical magnet. Once the OPAL reactor started in 2006, a significant amount of extra funding (A$2 million) was made available to purchase a large range of sample- environment equipment for hard condensed matter including a 5T high-temperature superconducting horizontal-field magnet (2007) in partnership with New Zealand, a 100kN horizontal load frame for the strain scanner (2008) with a furnace design copied from ISIS. A 1T Electromagnet and cryocooler, and an 11T wet horizontal cryomagnet with 3He one- shot fridge (2009) and optical windows for SANS experiments. Later two top-loading cryofurnaces arrived, allowing a much easier and faster sample change, along with a ‘Cobra’ single-crystal sample cooler for KOALA. Finally, based on user feedback, a dry toploading cryocooler for the 7T vertical magnet capable of 1.5K was purchased in 2011. For soft condensed matter, a range of equipment was also purchased including Langmuir troughs, a Differential Scanning Calorimeter, an impedence spectrometer, numerous solid-liquid cells, stopped-flow cells and a rheometer. For high pressure work, a Paris – Edinburgh cell was commissioned with the ability to apply pressure to samples up to 10 GPa. In 2009, a further injection of capital to sample environment, with the Neutron Beam Expansion Program (NBI-2), allowed us to design and procure a new suite of high-end equipment. In 2012 a new 12T vertical-field magnet has been commissioned. The design was done keeping in mind the necessities of the 3-axis instruments, TAIPAN and SIKA, and the PELICAN time-of-flight instrument and the need to do polarisation analysis on all instruments. The magnet has a sample rotation stage, and a 340 degree scattering angle. Single crystal mapping is possible with this magnet. The magnet is a classical wet magnet with a He recondensing stage. It needs a very modest amount of liquid He re-filling to keep it cold. Ten years of sample environments at the Bragg Institute Paolo Imperia, Scott Olsen and Stewart Pullen Th e fir st 1 0 ye ar s of th e B ra gg In st itu te 2 00 2 - 2 01 2 | 37 The 12T magnet was procured together with a 20 milliKelvin dilution refrigerator insert. This combination will allow cutting-edge research on exotic states of matter like Dirac strings, spin-ice states and so on. Further procurement, within the scope of the NBI-2 program, included a new sorption system for in-situ absorption and desorption measurements, with five gas streams allowing controlled mixtures of gases up to 200 bar, a vapour delivery system and a large amount of basic equipment like turbo-molecular vacuum pumps, roughing pumps and the everyday minutiae like tubing, cabling and all the related and associated electronics and controllers necessary to deliver excellence to a growing facility. In-house design of equipment. The in-house development of specialised sample environment equipment has provided a great capability to the Institute over the years: from the development of air furnaces to vacuum furnaces, pressure cells ranging from 100 to 3,500bar and special one-off equipment like the ‘Rapid Heat and Quench Cell’, the Environmental Chamber, Rapid Sample Quencher and most recently, an in-situ Differential Scanning Calorimeter for SANS. All have allowed the Institute’s Scientists and the user community to conduct their experiments under the conditions that off-the-shelf products cannot deliver. The most important feature of this group is its adaptability, with an ability to respond rapidly to the needs of the research community Gene Davidson transferring liquid nitrogen with QUOKKA in the background 38 | The group has delivered engineering solutions to complex problems, some being recognised by Engineers Australia through their Excellence Award program. In addition to our development of various pieces of sample-environment equipment, we have made numerous interface designs that allow various sample mounts and geometries to be used within our suite of equipment. This has often allowed highly successful experiments that would otherwise not have occurred. The most important feature of this group is its adaptability, with an ability to respond rapidly to the needs of the research community, something that is of great importance, and which will continue to contribute to the Institute’s success . Temperature range During the HIFAR days, our dry cryocoolers could operate in the range from 5K to 300K. The minimum temperature range was extended to reach 1.5K in 2007, with a wet cryostat, 0.4K in 2009 with a 3He refrigerator and finally 0.02K with a dilution refrigerator in 2012. Thanks to the inventiveness of the Sample- Environment team, this ‘standard’ temperature range has also been extended upwards with the standard cryostats up to 800K, using special purpose-built high-temperature sample holders. These allow a full temperature range from 4K up to 800K with a single cryorefurnace. In the HIFAR days, an air furnace capable of heating the samples up to 1100°C was built by Merv Perry. This furnace has recently been refurbished and is used occasionally on WOMBAT and ECHIDNA. It has a high background and small window, but is a robust and reliable piece of equipment. The current maximum sample temperature today is 1700°C using the ILL vacuum furnace purchased in 2006. Growing users support, continuous improvement The sample-environment group has been established from the beginning to take care of the equipment, and to deliver a problem-free experience to the scientific community, with a goal of smoothly running complex experiments requiring special environments. In this way, when the technical problems are minimised, the instrument scientists can fully concentrate on the scientific side of the experiments; the data analysis flows and papers are written. The first appointed manager of the Sample Environment group was Scott Olsen in 2006. An engineer by trade, he developed the group and started the international cooperation with other groups around the world. In 2009 Paolo Imperia took over the responsibility of the major capital projects and in 2011 has been appointed as successor of Scott as a group leader with operational responsibility. In 2010 the Bragg Institute’s international standing in sample environments was recognised with the award of the hosting rights for the 7th International Sample Environment workshop held in Sydney in September 2012. Our people Scott Olsen, Sample-Environment group leader 2006 to 2011 Paolo Imperia, Sample-Environment group leader since 2011 Merv Perry, started as unique sample-environment specialist at HIFAR Gene Davidson, dedicated specialist to cryogenics and magnets since 2005. Norman Booth, recently joined the group to take care of sorption, equipment for soft-matter and high- voltage experiments Stewart Pullen, started as an honours student in engineering with University of Western Sydney, and has designed and managed the projects for the construction of the purpose-built sample-environment equipment Students We have hosted a constant stream of summer students and year-in-industry students. These students have delivered excellent results on our ad- hoc projects and several of them, after the experience in the Sample Environment group, have continued to do research with neutrons. The engineering team A support team of mechanical technicians has also assisted the sample environment group, since the OPAL reactor started: Marty Jones, Andrew McGregor, Mark New, Matt Bell and Tai Nguyen. A group of design mechanical engineers was formed at the end of 2010 and they often assist with design and approvals: Stewart Pullen, Steven Pangelis, Jim Palmer and Adrian Ogrin. Ten years of sample environments at the Bragg Institute Paolo Imperia, Scott Olsen and Stewart Pullen Th e fir st 1 0 ye ar s of th e B ra gg In st itu te 2 00 2 - 2 01 2 | 39 A Gumtree retrospective Nick Hauser What is Gumtree? Gumtree is a graphical user interface for instrument control, data acquisition and data reduction. Why was Gumtree created? In 2002, Elliot Gilbert (QUOKKA instrument scientist) explicitly requested a graphical user interface for the instrument he was building and allocated budget towards its development. Other instrument scientists required only a command line interface and provided minimal budget. A workshop held in December 2002 confirmed Elliot’s request for a graphical user interface (GUI). The user community requested a GUI to make it easier for users to operate an instrument without remembering text commands and syntax. At that time, there were no ‘out of the box’ solutions. Solutions were available for device servers, but no one had provided a framework that could be easily configured to control an instrument with a GUI. This situation has changed significantly in the last 10 years and now there are several open-source solutions that have been developed by the neutron and X-ray scattering and accelerator physics communities. A difficult decision was made in early 2003 regarding instrument control. The Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), in Switzerland, had a minimalist but robust instrument control application with a command line interface, known as SICS (SINQ Instrument Control Server). It had no graphical interface and it wasn’t going to be straightforward to build one. However, we knew that we could get the instruments running with the least amount of resource and risk using the PSI solution. It was decided to use SICS. This decision transferred risk and resources into the graphical user interface development. Who created Gumtree and where? Andy Goetz spent 2003 with the Bragg Institute on sabbatical from ESRF Grenoble, and is credited as the creator of Gumtree. Andy loved the Australian bush, especially the outback. Since the instruments were given Australian fauna names, it seemed appropriate to call the control application Gumtree, that ubiquitous, tough Aussie eucalypt. Andy played a leading role in the creation of Gumtree, and the recruitment of Tony Lam, Gumtree’s lead developer. Andy is a prolific software inventor, having created products including the TANGO device server and the FABLE / DAWN visualisation applications. Andy had 17 years’ experience with ESRF at the time of Gumtree’s creation. Why Java and Eclipse? It was a requirement set by instrument users that the application be cross-platform, explicitly Mac, Linux and Windows, so that instrument users could install Gumtree on their favourite operating system. Hence Java was the chosen language. However, it came with a compromise; the range of scientific applications was limited, especially plotting and data manipulation. These applications would appear in the open-source in later years, but caused major challenges early in the project. The choice of the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) provided benefits and additional constraints to those of Java. The major benefits were Eclipse’s plug-in architecture, which promised simple integration of third party plug-ins to enhance Gumtree’s features. The second benefit was Eclipse’s windowing environment, which controlled the many views required for instrument control, data acquisition and data reduction that are required for the many techniques that Gumtree was commissioned to facilitate. Eclipse RCP was first released in the year that we started using it. Lesson 1: Never use bleeding edge technology. The constraint was that RCP had no scientific plugins at the time and it used 40 | a graphical technology called SWT, which would further reduce our options. Yes, we were painted into a corner and were waiting for the paint to dry. As with all computer languages and frameworks, there was a long and steep learning curve. In addition, RCP had new software engineering concepts which were difficult to understand. From 2004 to 2008 the door to the development team’s room was revolving, with 13 developers coming and going through that period, with an average stay of just over a year, only long enough to learn the technology. Two developers stayed for more than three years and have made the most significant advances in Gumtree. By comparison, the SICS application has four developers since 2004, the lead developer since project initiation. It was difficult to define a protocol to connect Gumtree to SICS. A breakthrough was made by our PSI collaborator, Mark Koennecke, with his invention of the hipadaba (hierarchical database) interface to SICS, and Ferdi Franceschini and Tony Lam using the json protocol to encode messages. This allowed SICS to have an interface that was machine friendly. In hindsight Gumtree would have been done differently. It would have been simpler and used more conservative technology. It probably should have been developed to run on a single operating system and as a single application, rather than using the client-server pattern. If the project had started in 2008, the ‘Generic Data Acquisition’ from the Diamond Light Source or the ‘Control System Studio’ from Argonne and DESY would have fulfilled the user requirements. Interestingly, both these products are built on the same Eclipse RCP platform. Does Gumtree work? All the challenges were overcome and Gumtree is now operating on five of the seven operational instruments. The key to getting Gumtree to work has been to tame the complexity of the Eclipse beast by creating simple components. This sounds easy, but in practice was difficult. Now the beast is tame, and effort is being put into the Gumtree’s original purpose, to make running neutron scattering experiments easy for novice users. We’re not there yet, but we believe that we’re on the right track. Has anyone else adopted Gumtree? The SINQ at PSI created a minimalist version of Gumtree (known as Gumtree Swiss Edition). The Soleil (France) and DESY (Germany) synchrotrons collaborate with ANSTO over Gumtree’s data object plugin (CDMA). What is the future? It is a vision for the future that there be a best-of- breed solution for instrument control for the X-ray and neutron scattering communities which is a collaboration of many facilities. With the Bragg Institute working more closely with the Australian Synchrotron, it would be beneficial in the short term for both organisations to adopt a common solution. Acknowledgements and thanks Bragg Institute instrument scientists for ideas, feedback and support. Andy Goetz, Mark Koennecke, Tony Lam and Norman Xiong, the creators and problem solvers. Paul Hathaway, Andrew Campbell (year in industry), Hugh Rayner (year in industry), Ziwen Liu (year in industry) Adrian Chong (vacation), Darren Kelly, Bernadette Garner, Jian Gui Wang, Lindsay Winkler, Danil Klimintov, Rodney Davies, Lidia Zhang, the developers. Rob Robinson and Shane Kennedy for sponsorship and support. This sounds easy, but in practice was difficult A Gumtree retrospective Nick Hauser Th e fir st 1 0 ye ar s of th e B ra gg In st itu te 2 00 2 - 2 01 2 | 41 The technique of neutron reflectometry has become very popular in the past few decades. This is because it is adept at studying the structures of thin films at interfaces, such as the polymer films found in organo-photo voltaics, or the interaction of proteins with bilayer membranes. The rapid expansion of the neutron reflectometry community has been aided, in part, by the development of advanced reflectometers, SURF and INTER at ISIS, FIGARO and D17 at the ILL and PLATYPUS at OPAL, to name but a few. These reflectometers have pushed back the frontiers of the technique, with the complexity of experiments increasing rapidly. Consequently, the volume of data streaming from these instruments has expanded greatly, but in many cases the scientists obtaining the data have not been able to keep up. This is mainly due to the lack of analysis tools available to the community that scientists can master and that are advanced enough to cope with the wide range of datasets thrown at them. The Motofit program started development in 2005 to address these issues. Its initial focus was the ability to do least-squares co-refinement of multiple contrast (X-ray and neutron) datasets within an easy to use Graphical User Interface (GUI) based program. Multiple contrast co-refinement helps alleviate the phase problem, allowing unique structures to be identified. Whilst programs with this ability already existed, they were hard to use and were not within easy reach of the average scientist. Unfortunately the GUI based analysis programs available at that time could not co-refine multiple datasets. Motofit immediately solved that issue, marrying advanced functionality and ease of use in a single program. Since its initial conception, development has been continuous, making several cutting-edge advancements available to the reflectometry community. Two examples are: • genetic optimisation – essential for global optimisation of multi-variable least-squares systems. • batch fitting – kinetic measurements produce hundreds of datasets which need to be analysed in a consistent manner, without taking a long time. The utility of the Motofit program has meant that it is now one of the most popular programs of its type around the world, with around 150 citations since its inception (30 citations/year). Its popularity has led to new scientific collaborations between myself and researchers from around the world. These collaborations have advanced new features in Motofit, such as the application of Chebyshev basis sets and cubic – B – splines in freeform modelling approaches, as well as attracting new users to the PLATYPUS instrument. Motofit Andrew Nelson Arrival of PLATYPUS’s vacuum vessel in 2006 42 | Showing Cardinal George Pell around in 2006A leaving party in Bangor in 2009 Showing Senator Chris Evans around in 2012 The Beam Instruments Advisory Group in 2003 Dino Ius and our all-digital safety interlock system Th e fir st 1 0 ye ar s of th e B ra gg In st itu te 2 00 2 - 2 01 2 | 43 The Bragg Institute in 2007 Small-angle scattering from the superconducting flux-line lattice in niobium on QUOKKA 44 | In the year 2000, I was a member of a small team of biologists/microbiologists/biochemists in ANSTO’s Environment Division. At that time, it had become apparent that our strategic position and relevance to ANSTO’s research effort was increasingly becoming marginalised, in part because of a move away from the study of mine-site impacts and in part because of the Executive’s view that we lacked critical mass and weren’t essential. Personally, a key symptom was that 60 per cent of my time had been diverted onto working on development and certification of ANSTO’s Environmental Management System which in reality consumed much more time. In the face of this, I began contemplating how to re-orient us to ANSTO core business and the obvious question was how we could involve ourselves with science related to the new OPAL reactor which was under construction. From these musings began a somewhat misguided search for information on neutrons. I thought I had heard of neutron microscopes and a senior environment manager indicated vaguely that he believed the Russians were doing such work. I hadn’t heard about the Bragg Institute and really knew nothing about what had been done at HIFAR previously. Coincidentally, ANSTO had an externally designed corporate learning initiative (LENS) in play, which emphasised active learning and required staff to undertake ALES (Active Learning Exercises – not Fosters!) in teams and the biologists banded together to do one on neutron scattering. We searched the literature and had some early interactions with Bragg Institute staff, including Robert Knott and Mike James. Early in 2001, I had discussions with the Director of the Environment Division, Professor Ann Henderson- Sellers, about the desire to put forward a new project and the suggestion that it be on biological applications of neutron and X-ray scattering. She encouraged me to do so and I also began to have some interaction with Rob Robinson who was responsible for the Bragg Institute. At that time, Robert Knott was the only person in the Neutron Scattering and Synchrotron Radiation Group who had extensive experience in biological applications of scattering (SANS for structural biolog