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Council (STFC) and the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR, the Italian National Research Council) have signed an agreement worth €15M to further develop collaboration between the two countries in the field of neutron scattering using the STFC ISIS facility, the UK’s pulsed neutron and muon source.

Italy is one of ISIS’s longest standing international partners, with this agreement building on nearly 30 years of collaboration and Professor Cristina Messa, Vice President of CNR and responsible for research infrastructures visited ISIS in connection with the signing of the agreement and said:

“The collaboration between ISIS and CNR has been a long and fruitful one that has benefitted scientists in both countries. With this new agreement we can look forward to a range of exciting developments, including new instruments and capabilities and ensuring the excellent facilities at ISIS are fully exploited by the Italian scientific community.”

In the last five years Italian involvement with ISIS has included over 300 Italian scientists having produced 200 publications based on research undertaken at the facility. Italian science at ISIS spans a wide range of areas from fundamental studies through to biomaterials, materials for energy and cultural heritage studies. Future collaboration is aimed at ensuring the mutually beneficial development of instrumentation and techniques.

Professor Robert McGreevy, Director of ISIS at STFC said:

“We have an excellent track record of nearly 30 years close collaboration with Italy, with notable achievements including the development of the INES, VESUVIO and TOSCA instruments. I’m delighted that the signing of this agreement provides a framework for continued success and the expansion of the partnership into new and exciting areas.”

Recent examples of collaboration have included:

• The operation of the INES instrument at ISIS. INES is a powder diffractometer, built in 2005 by the CNR and used for a wide range of materials characterisation and cultural heritage applications. This has included studying how ancient Japanese swords (katanas) were manufactured without first damaging the swords.
  
• The commissioning and exploitation of two new instruments on the ISIS Second Target Station, ChipIR and Imat. ChipIR will be used by the electronics industry to test their devices against the effects of cosmic ray neutrons, and Imat is an engineering strain and imaging beamline due to come into operation in 2015.

There is also potential partnership in a wide variety of other instrument and technique developments. This includes developing TOSCA, a vibrational spectroscopy instrument, that has recently been used to better understand how we can manufacture a carbon based fuel from more freely available sources and which could help reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, and Engin-X which is an engineering strain instrument that uses neutron diffraction to measure stress in metal objects such as train wheels and plane wings.

The agreement comes into effect on 8 March 2014 and will continue for six years.

Notes to editors

Images are available from the STFC Press office care of Corinne Mosese.

Contact

Corinne Mosese
STFC Press Officer
01793 442870

ISIS

ISIS is a world-leading centre for research in the physical and life sciences at the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford in the United Kingdom. Our suite of neutron and muon instruments gives unique insights into the properties of materials on the atomic scale. We support a national and international community of more than 3000 scientists for research into subjects ranging from clean energy and the environment, pharmaceuticals and health care, through to nanotechnology and materials engineering, catalysis and polymers, and on to fundamental studies of materials.

We use the technique of neutron scattering. Neutrons tell us where atoms are and how they are moving. By studying how materials work at the atomic level, we can better understand their every-day properties – and so make new materials tailor-made for particular uses. ISIS also produces muons for use in a similar way, providing additional information on how materials work at the atomic scale.

CNR, the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche

CNR, the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (National Research Council) of Italy role is to carry out, promote, spread, transfer and improve research activities in the main sectors of knowledge growth and of its applications for the scientific, technological, economic and social development of the Country.