Neutron techniques for Materials Science at the ISIS facility

Neutron techniques for Materials Science at the ISIS facility

VICTORIA GARCIA SAKAI

Isis neutron and muon source, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, STFC (UK)

 

Neutrons are a unique probe to find out ‘where atoms are and what atoms do’ in materials. They provide complementary information to X-rays, they are highly penetrating but non-destructive and have the advantage that they see hydrogen and deuterium differently, thus enabling isotopic labelling. The UK hosts a world-leading neutron facility, ISIS, which is available for scientific research in a broad range of fields. In this seminar, I will run through what ISIS is and how it works, and give you a flavour of the type of information that one can get from this technique. I will try and cover a wide scientific remit, but will spend more time talking about my expertise in soft matter and bio-related examples.

BIO Victoria García Sakai (VGS) is a staff scientist at the ISIS facility, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK, where she is responsible for the time of flight backscattering spectrometer IRIS. VGS obtained her PhD in Polymer Thermodynamics at Imperial College London in 2002, after which she started her career with neutrons at The Pennsylvania State University. VGS has been an instrument scientist since 2007 on various backscattering spectrometers. She is a world leading expert in the characterisation of the  dynamics  in  soft  condensed  matter  systems  (surfactants,  proteins,  lipids,  polymers…)  using neutron spectroscopy. VGS is the editor of Dynamics of Soft Matter book, Springer (2012), the author of a review on Quasielastic neutron scattering in soft matter (COCIS, 2009) and has published over 80 peer-review papers in the field. Her expertise is evidenced by her advisory roles at leading international  neutron  centers  such  as being  Member  of  ILL  Scientific  Council,  Chair  of  the Spectroscopy Panel at the ESS, and member of review panels in Russia, Germany, USA and Japan). VGS has over 10 years’ experience training students and postdocs in neutron techniques and is Director of the Oxford School of Neutron Scattering.