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For many decades, Europe has been a leader in neutron and muon science, establishing one of the most productive and well-developed research communities in the world. Much of the strength of the Eur...

For the last five years, collaboration between European neutron and muon facilities has been centred around the NMI3 project – the Integrated Infrastructure Initiative (I3) for Neutron Scattering and Muon Spectroscopy. This project has recently finished, so it is timely to look back at NMI3’s successes (many) and its failures (few).

The Studsvik Neutron Research Laboratory (Neutronforsknings-laboratoriet—NFL), which is administered by the University of Uppsala, is the center for reactor based research in physics, chemistry, biology and materials science for scientists at Swedish universities and other institutions. Within the past two years the facilities have also been made available to scientists from other countries. There are approximately 30 permanent staff members at NFL, and in addition, ten researchers and thesis students spend a significant amount of time there. Between 30 percent and 70 percent of the time on all the instruments is allocated by the Research Board which meets twice a year to consider proposals. The remainder of the time is allocated at the discretion of senior scientists. Research proposals can be submitted at any time, though the formal dates for proposals to be considered by the Research Board are April 15th and October 15th. Reports on the experiments that have been performed, and on other work a...

On three continents major new neutron scattering facilities are under construction that will provide unprecedented opportunities for scientific discovery. The Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) under construction at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) will become operational in 2006, the Japanese Spallation Source is planned for completion in 2007, and the second target station at ISIS is due to come on-line in 2008. All three will be equipped with state-of-the-art instrumentation, large detector arrays and, with the associated increases in flux, will deliver orders of magnitude increases in data volume. Current data visualization and analysis software will be seriously challenged to keep pace with these changes.