Report on the Workshop on “Magnetic Small Angle Neutron Scattering - Data Analysis and Software Prospects”

Abstract

M agnetic Small-Angle Neutron Scattering (mSANS) is a powerful technique that has become a critical tool for condensed matter studies, providing a unique insight into material properties, and at the same time showing increasing potential for a variety of soft matter studies. This results in the need for an easily accessible, common, robust and maintained program to analyze magnetic SANS data. To tackle this challenge, a 2-day workshop titled “Magnetic SANS – Data Analysis and Software Prospects” was organized by Lund University and the SasView development team in June 2022, in cooperation with the New Materials Theme at the LINXS Institute of Advanced Neutron and X-ray Science (Figure 1): https:// www.linxs.se/events/2022/6/13/ linxs-workshop-magnetic-sans-dataanalysis-and-software-prospects. Experimentalists, theoreticians, and code developers of all career stages discussed the current needs in the field as well as recent advances and future prospects for recording, analyzing, and simulating magnetic SANS data in SasView, and how SasView might interact with other tools. SasView is an open source community developed software tool (https://www.sasview.org/), in which the ability to compute magnetic scattering cross sections has recently been added to release version 5.0.5. Capabilities for the analysis and simulation of magnetic scattering data within this newly released version were presented, followed by open discussions on the current constraints, and how to optimize workflows for handling polarized SANS data. In small group discussions, questions like “What are you currently missing regarding data analysis and simulation to optimally process your data?”, or “Which in-house developed functions and workflows are you using because public software packages do not yet provide them?” were addressed, and the outcomes listed as action items to be implemented into SasView. To capitalize on the outcomes, the SasView Development Team held one of their occasional Hackathons (https:// indico.esss.lu.se/event/3009/) immediately after the Magnetic SANS workshop, encouraging the participants to actively take part in the development