SANS-LLB at PSI: keeping up with the soft matter community needs

The shutdown of the Orphée reactor at LLB (Saclay, France) and the upgrade of the SINQ neutron guide system at PSI (Villigen, Switzerland) in 2019 were the beginning of a long-term collaboration between PSI and LLB. The SANS-LLB instrument, formerly known as PA20, has travelled more than 500 km, and since 2020 is being installed at SINQ/PSI as a collaborative effort between PSI and LLB. The aim is to make a modern SANS instrument available to the soft matter neutron scattering community at the SINQ spallation source. The oversubscription for SANS beamtime is currently the highest among all instruments at SINQ. The modern SANS-LLB will thus be of great help to keep up with need for neutron beamtime in the coming years.

SANS-LLB mainly consists of the state-of-the-art instrumentation of PA20. In order to adapt to the new neutron source and the sample environments available at PSI, the polarizer, the collimation, and the sample table were updated. SANS-LLB expects to receive its first friendly users in the second half of 2022, and to join the user program in 2023. For this period, a user proposal call should be announced by PSI and LLB around November 2022.

A French-Swiss Meeting “SANS for Soft Matter” was organized jointly by the PSI-LLB team in Strasbourg/France in March 2022, attracting many scientists eager to use SANS-LLB in the coming years.