A fast neutron Laue-diffractometer

CYCLOPS (CYlindrical Ccd Laue Octagonal Photo Scintillator) is a new ILL instrument with unique characteristics. It was installed at the end of the thermal neutron guide H24 by june 2009. Its main part is an octogonal detector made of 16 high performance thermoelectrically cooled image intensified CCD cameras. The present total active scintillator area is of (4 x) 400 x 166 mm², each pixel is 172 μm on edge. The total readout time is ~1 sec.

This movie was recorded during the very first tests. It shows that exposures as short as of a few seconds are enough to get excellent Laue patterns from a sample of a few mm³. For example, the patterns shown in the movie clearly demonstrate that the crystal is twinned, all Bragg spots being splitted. In other words a few seconds were enough to assess the quality of the sample but this one amongst the many potential applications of neutron Laue diffraction combined with fast data acquisition rate.