The 11th American Conference on Neutron Scattering

Abstract

The 11th American Conference on Neutron Scattering (ACNS) was held June 5–9, 2022, on the University of Colorado, Boulder campus and attracted 278 attendees. The meeting, organized by the Neutron Scattering Society of America (NSSA), was led by Conference Chair and NSSA Vice President Peter Gehring (National Institute of Standards and Technology [NIST]) and NSSA President Young Lee (Stanford University) together with the Local Committee Co-chairs Steven DeCaluwe (Colorado School of Mines) and Dmitry Reznik (University of Colorado). The overall conference coordination was handled by the Materials Research Society, which has done so since 2008. ACNS Program Co-chairs Katie Weigandt (NIST) and Stephen Wilson (University of California, Santa Barbara) developed and coordinated the conference program, which they organized into the following scientific themes: Advances in Neutron Facilities, Instrumentation, and Software; Hard Condensed Matter; Soft Matter; Biology, Biophysics, and Biotechnology; Materials Chemistry and Energy; Structural Materials and Engineering; Neutron Physics; and Emerging Applications in Neutron Scattering: Machine Learning and Data Science. Plenary sessions were held in the mornings and featured presentations by one NSSA prize winner and one plenary speaker. Invited and contributed talks followed and were grouped into four parallel sessions focused on one of the scientific themes. Posters were presented in sessions on Monday and Wednesday evenings. The ACNS program consisted of eight award/plenary talks, 28 invited talks, 185 contributed talks, and 51 posters. Two tutorials were offered on the first day. These were organized by volunteers from the NSSA community and were titled “Analyzing Small-Angle-Scattering Data with Modern Python” and “Recent Advances in Neutron Spin Echo Science and Technology.” A welcome reception followed the tutorials. The main scientific program began on Monday, and many special events were held throughout the week, including the NCNR User Group (NUG) and SNS/ HFIR User Group (SHUG) meetings, an exhibitor hall, the ACNS Banquet, a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) discussion focused on barriers to access for neutron science, a breakout discussion on how to improve the user experience with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) neutron data systems, and the Women in Neutron Science Mixer. The Monday morning session started with the awarding of the Clifford G. Shull Prize in Neutron Scattering to Dan A. Neumann (NIST) “for outstanding contributions, leadership, and vision to the neutron scattering community as scientist, mentor, instrument developer, and facility steward” (Figure 1). Neumann’s presentation “Tailoring Instruments to the Science and the Source: 35 Years at the NCNR” was a personal retrospective that discussed the people and seminal events that shaped the NCNR as well as his career over the past three decades. After first expressing gratitude to his primary mentors Hartmut Zabel (his Ph.D. advisor), Jack Rush, and Mike Rowe, Neumann chronicled the birth and evolution of the NCNR Guide Hall and cold source. This spawned an enormous growth in soft matter research at NIST as new SANS and neutron reflectometry instruments were brought online. A parallel emphasis was placed on developing state-ofthe-art cold neutron spectrometers. Neumann amusingly recalled the time Jack Rush told him “Hey kid! You have to build a backscattering instrument.” Rush challenged him to maximize the data rate while keeping the energy resolution below 1 μeV. To meet this challenge, Neumann decided to incorporate into his design a novel chopper, conceived by Schelten and Alefeld in 1984, to effect a phase-space transformation Meeting Report