Our history

When the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source produced its first neutrons, it was the end of one journey to secure funding and design and build the source. It was  the start of another much longer journey – the transition into operation and the ongoing cycle of development and improve­ment that has characterised ISIS ever since.

The name of the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source was inspired by that of the river Thames as it flows through Oxford and the Egyptian goddess of rein­carnation. The relevance of the latter relates to the fact that ISIS was built reusing much of the infrastructure and some components from the NIMROD 7 GeV proton synchrotron that operated at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory between 1964 and 1978.

Throughout the design and development phase, ISIS, then called the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS), benefited from highly effective collaborations with sim­ilar sources that were being developed at the same time. These included the KENS source at KEK in Tsukuba, Japan, which started operation in 1980, the LAMPF fa­cility at Los Alamos and, most importantly, the Intense Pulsed Neutron Source (IPNS) at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois which, under the leadership of Jack Carpenter, started operations in 1981.

The SNS was approved in 1977, and the first beam produced in 1984. In October 1985, the source was renamed ISIS and for­mally opened by then UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

The first four operational instruments were the High-Resolution Powder Diffractometer (HRPD), the Liquids and Amorphous Diffractometer (LAD), which was transferred from the Harwell LINAC, the High Energy Transfer (HET) spectrometer and a microeV spectrometer, IRIS. The CRISP reflectometer, LoQ SANs instrument, eVS high-energy resonance filter spectrometer and the Polaris and SXD diffractometers followed shortly thereafter. Building on experience gained during operation, the instrument suite and source performance continued to evolve to ensure optimal coverage of a broad scientific program and to optimise power and reliability. In 1987, the first muon spectrometer, MuSR, came online. The complementarity of muon spectroscopy and neutron scattering techniques for condensed matter studies brought a steady growth in demand for muon facilities and two further muon instruments came online in 1993. The RIKEN-RAL muon facility, a collaboration between ISIS and RIKEN in Japan, became operational in 1994, providing both negative and positive muons, as well as four additional experimental ports.

In 2003, funding was agreed for the construction of the ISIS Target Station 2 (TS2), which offered the potential of a factor two increase in capacity, and the opportunity to create a source optimised for lower energies and longer wavelengths. This, in turn, provided new capabilities in nanoscience, magnetism, imaging, electronics, and more. Target Station 2 was completed in 2008 and since then, further investment has expanded the ISIS instrument suite to the current level of 30 neutron and 5 muon instruments.

Throughout its history, ISIS has benefited from significant partnerships with international research orga­nisations. Collaborations with Italy, India, Japan, the Netherlands and Sweden, amongst others, have sup­ported the development of new instrumentation and facilitated productive scientific collaborations to exploit ISIS’s capabilities. ISIS is a national facility with a strong international character, typically welcoming users from over 30 countries each year.

The facility has also benefited from the outstanding contributions of remarkable, highly skilled and committed indi­viduals and teams, maintaining focus on development and innovation and ensuring the delivery of an outstand­ing science programme.

Certainly, ISIS has developed and thrived for the last 40 years. Developments currently in train, such as the Endeavour programme, and the wealth of ideas and ambition for fur­ther development, including plans for ISIS-II, provide the basis for ISIS to remain in the vanguard of global neutron and muon science for many years to come. At least for the next 40 years.