PONTO—An instrument for imaging with polarized neutrons

An imaging instrument dedicated to radiography and tomography with polarized cold neutrons was installed and successfully tested at the BER II reactor at Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin. The spatial resolution for un-polarized neutrons was less than 85 μm for a point-to-detector distance of 5 mm, in the case of polarized neutrons it was less than 300 μm. With these resolutions, details of magnetic fields in different lead samples below the critical temperature being in the Meissner phase and magnetic flux pinning could be imaged.     

First experimental implementation of pulse shaping for neutron diffraction on pulsed sources

One of the central issues in the design and the use of pulsed neutron sources is the control of pulse length in elastic scattering experiments, most significantly diffraction on crystalline matter. On the existing short pulse spallation sources the strongly wavelength dependent source pulse length that determines the resolution is permanently fixed on each beam line by the type of the moderator it faces. We have experimentally implemented for the first time the wavelength frame multiplication (WFM) multiplexing chopper method, an earlier proposed variant of the by now fully tested repetition rate multiplication technique for inelastic scattering spectroscopy on pulsed neutron sources. We have operated the time-of-flight diffractometer at the continuous reactor source at BNC in an unconventional multiplexing mode that emulates a pulsed source. As a full proof of principle of the WFM method we have experimentally demonstrated the extraction from each source pulse a series of polychromatic, chopper shaped neutron pulses, which can continuously cover any wavelength band. The achieved 25 μs FWHM pulse length is shorter than that can be obtained at all at short pulse spallation sources for cold neutrons. The method allows us to build efficient, high and variable resolution diffractometers at long pulse spallation sources.     

Coded source neutron imaging with a MURA mask

In coded source neutron imaging the single aperture commonly used in neutron radiography is replaced with a coded mask. Using a coded source can improve the neutron flux at the sample plane when a very high L/D ratio is needed. The coded source imaging is a possible way to reduce the exposure time to get a neutron image with very high L/D ratio. A 17×17 modified uniformly redundant array coded source was tested in this work. There are 144 holes of 0.8 mm diameter on the coded source. The neutron flux from the coded source is as high as from a single 9.6 mm aperture, while its effective L/D is the same as in the case of a 0.8 mm aperture. The Richardson-Lucy maximum likelihood algorithm was used for image reconstruction. Compared to an in-line phase contrast neutron image taken with a 1 mm aperture, it takes much less time for the coded source to get an image of similar quality.