News

The rare earth nickelates RNiO3 with the high Ni3+ oxidation state have continued to attract enormous interest due to the famous metal-insulator transition and unusual charge and spin-order phenomena. The prediction for multiferroicity and even superconductivity in thin film hetero-structures have triggered new intensive research efforts. However, our theoretical understanding remains limited. Lo…

Neutrinos are notoriously hard-to-detect elementary particles. They are produced in the core of stars, at particle accelerators, in very high energy phenomena or – as in STEREO – in nuclear reactor cores. Neutrinos do not carry any electric charge and only rarely do they interact with matter. Nowadays, we know of three types: electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos and tau neutrinos. The 20-year old a…

Protein dynamics are characterized by fluctuations among different conformational substates, i.e. the different minima of their energy landscape. At temperatures above ~200K, these fluctuations lead to a steep increase in the thermal dependence of all dynamical properties, a phenomenon known as th…

It was an honour today for the ILL to receive the visit of five consulate officials from Lyon. Management took pleasure in presenting the Institute’s activities to these VIP representatives from some of the Institute’s Associate and Scientific Member countries:           •    For Germany: Ms Dorothee Heidorn, Consul and Mr Max Maldacker, Consul General           •    For Italy: Mr Alberto Bertoni…

On January 30 this year the ILL Director Helmut Schober had the pleasure of welcoming Professor Krzysztof Kurek, the Director General of Poland’s National Centre for Nuclear Research (NCBJ) in Warsaw, for an official visit to the Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble.In a short general presentation Prof. Schober introduced the Institute’s governance and business model and highlighted the involvement…

Vew from "acoustic levitation: a movie by Alain Filhol. ©2012, Institut Laue-Langevin, Grenoble, France" The drying process is a critical final stage in various manufacturing processes – it influences the quality of many a product and has many industrial …

23.01.2012Bristol University team dissolve iron in liquid surfactant to create a soap that can be controlled by magnets. The discovery, published today in Angewandte Chemie, could be used to create cleaning products that can be removed after application and used in the recovery of oil spills at se…

28.01.2016Gels are materials that are present in many everyday products such as shampoos, sunscreens and food gelatin among many others. They are formed by mixtures in which large amounts of liquid, usually water, are confined within a flexible network of polymer chains or colloidal particles. Amo…

10.04.2013Research at Birkbeck, University of London uses world-leading neutron sources at ILL and ISIS to demonstrate ozone attacks on lung surface fluidsA research team from Birkbeck and Royal Holloway Colleges at the University of London, and Uppsala University in Sweden, have helped explain ho…

Neutrons reveal atomic hydrogen diffusion through ‘quantum tunnelling’ on grapheneGraphene is known as the world’s thinnest material due to its 2D structure, where each sheet is only one carbon atom thick, allowing each atom to engage in a chemical reaction from two sides. Graphene flakes can have…

November 2013Fluctuating charge stripes are among the more popular candidates to explain high-temperature superconductivity. So far escaping direct observation  the peculiar ‘hourglass’ magnetic excitation spectrum was taken as evidence for their existence. New Nature Communications paper now find…

Neutron experiments at the ILL contribute to the discovery of a new process of magnetic fragmentation - creating a monopole crystal in a spin ice The IN5 detector. Copyright Bernhard Lehn December 2017To date, the ability of an entity being two mutually exclusive s…