Overview.
INES is a general purpose diffractometer and is mainly devoted to materials characterisation (structure refinement, phase and elemental composition analysis). A large part of the science performed on INES involves cultural heritage studies, involving collaborations with multiple stakeholders, museums/curators, and researchers in the field. Texture and strain analysis has applications with industrial partners. The versatility of the instrument means that it is also used for large-equipment and detector testing at ISIS. INES is equipped with multiple detector types for the measurement of neutron powder diffraction, neutron resonance transmission imaging (NRTI), and gamma emission from neutron resonance capture analysis (NRCA).
Science Areas.
The very large sample area allows the measurement of large objects. The high resolution (~0.12%) coupled with the large d-spacing accessible range (0.2-12 Å) makes INES suitable for structural characterization of various kind of materials. Applications include:- Nuclear and magnetic structure refinement from powder neutron diffraction.
- Quantitative multiphase analysis.
- Texture and strain analysis.
- Neutron resonance transmission imaging (NRTI) - neutron radiography.
- Neutron resonance capture analysis (NRCA) - gamma emission spectroscopy.
History.
INES was built in 2005, and is managed by the Italian National Research Council (CNR) within the cooperation agreement with STFC. The instrument has run a user programme since 2006. Beamtime is available to users of any nationality.
