During 9-14th July, I attended the 2018 Croucher Summer Course on Neutron Scattering held at the City University of Hong Kong. The China Spallation Neutron Source (CSNS) in Dongguan has already been open to user this yeaThis course aims at training potential users for the newly built facility. Neutrons interact only with the nucleus of materials, giving it excellent sensitivity to light atoms as well as isotopes, which is the advantages over X-rays. It also interacts with magnetic field due to its own spin, which can be used to probe magnetic structure and electron spin fluctuation. What’s more, we can even obtain thermal dynamic properties of materials via inelastic scattering. We have many experts in the field and 32 students from all over the world for this course, I enjoyed and learnt a lot from the lectures, group projects as well as discussion with fellow students and teachers. The topics including different techniques like neutron diffraction, small angle scattering, quasi elastic scattering and inelastic scattering, etc. I joined the inelastic scattering group on how to extract the phonon density of states of some materials such as Vanadium, Silicon and Aluminum by subtracting the background, elastic scattering and multiphonon information from raw scattering data. Luckily, our group won the Best Presentation Award in the presentation competitions. This course broadened my research horizon with many types of special characterization techniques.
– reported by Yiqun