Two hundred researchers descended on the beautiful mountain village of Sun-Moon Lake in Central Taiwan, for an International Workshop on Neutron Scattering.
Seven Bragg Institute staff participated actively in the meeting, along with four leading experts from other leading neutron laboartories around the world.
The workshop was split into 2 parts with the first day on hard-matter and magnetism and the second on soft-matter and biology, and lectures by Profs. Tsang-Lan Lin, Chih-Hua Lee, Hsin-Lung Chen and Lieh-Jeng Chang (all from National Tsing-Hua University), Shi-Jung Bai (from National Sun Yat Sen University), Chao-Hung Du (from Tamkang University) and Shir-Ly Huang and Wen-Hsien Li (National Central University).
The context was the investment by the National Science Council of Taiwan in a new high-performance cold-neutron 3-Axis Spectrometer (SIKA) at the new OPAL reactor in Sydney Australia, and the National Science Council's support for a strong user program across all the instruments at OPAL.
In addition to speakers from ANSTO, there were lectures on Multiferroics, 2-D antiferromagnets, Quantum Magnets, and a range of other topics in condensed-matter physics by Jeff Lynn (NIST), Niels Christensen (SINQ), Kazu Kakurai (JAEA) and Jiri Kulda (ILL).
All in all, over 254 had registered for the meeting, but the accommodation was limited to 200 predominantly from Taiwan.
Nevertheless, 47 different groups from around Taiwan attended, covering fields as diverse as physics, mechanical engineering, earth sciences, opto-electronics, life-sciences, chemical engineering, chemistry and materials science.
The main meeting was followed up by a smaller more-focussed workshop on 11-12 June to determine the nature of the secondary spectrometer for SIKA, which is scheduled to commence operation in 2009.
Published: 09/06/2007