Inaugural lecture by Ken Andersen

Half a career in neutron scattering

Ken Andersen, head of the Instruments
Division at the ESS in Lund, Sweden.

Neutron scattering can give both qualitative and quantitative information about the structure and dynamics of materials which is inaccessible using any other technique. The amount of information which can be extracted is, however, often severely restricted by the inherently low brightness of even the most intense neutron sources in the world. Over the last 30 years or so, almost all of the improvements in neutron data quality have been driven, not by increases in source brightness, but by improvements in neutron scattering instrumentation.

I will give an overview of the neutron instrumentation work which I have been involved with, ranging from backscattering spectroscopy to polarisation analysis and general time-of-flight instrument design. Some perspectives are given for instruments at the ESS.

About the speaker: 

Ken Andersen is head of the Instruments Division at the European Spallation Source in Lund, Sweden. Once up and running in 2019, the ESS will be the world's leading facility for research using neutrons. Ken is responsible for supervising the optimisation and design of the 22 neutron instruments on which the research will be performed. He joined the ESS in 2010 from the Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble where he led the Neutron Optics lab, supporting instrument design and instrumentation development at the ILL.