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How neutrons help decode ion transport membranes essential for energy transition devices.

The ILL concluded 2025 operations at the end of October. In total, more than 1800 scientists came on site to perform close to 1400 experiments. The High-Flux Reactor will restart in late March 2026 for a year with 3 operating cycles in the programme.

The Joint Evaluated Fission and Fusion (JEFF) Library combines and makes available the experimental and theoretical knowledge on nuclear data. Release JEFF-4.0 is a significant achievement for the community with major ILL contributions.

Last week, the very first team of users has been performing experiments on the SHARPER instrument at the ILL.

Energy-resolved neutron experiments provide insights into novel energy technologies

Some magnetic materials feature peculiar states the fundamental understanding of which may pave the way for future applications. Neutron experiments have just revealed that they can be unexpectedly stable with respect to microscopic disorder.

In everyday life, we typically encounter water in one of three familiar states – solid, liquid or gas. But there are in fact many more phases, some of which – predicted to exist at high temperature and pressure – are so strange they’re referred to as exotic. State-of-the-art neutron spectrometers and sample environment infrastructures at the Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) have enabled the first experimental observation of one of these exotic phases – plastic ice VII.

The SHARPER instrument at the ILL came online during the second 2024 reactor cycle, which run for 16 May to 9 June. SHARPER is a time-focusing time-of-flight spectrometer designed for quasi-elastic and inelastic scattering built and operated at the ILL by the Léon Brillouin Laboratory (Saclay, France) as a CRG (Collaborating Research Group) instrument.

A study now published in Nature Communications brings remarkable insights into the enigmatic behaviour of supercritical fluids, a hybrid state of matter occupying a unique space between liquids and gases, and arising in domains ranging from the pharmaceutical industry to planetary science. The obtained results are at the limit of current experimental possibilities and could only be obtained in a high-flux neutron source such as the ILL.

The original instrument SHARP (Spectromètre Hybride Alpes Région Parisienne, former IN6) becomes SHARPER (Spectromètre Hybride Alpes Région Parisienne Etendu en Résolution).

Courtesy of 2FDN - Written by Valentina Giordano

Neutron spectroscopy provides a range of tools to study the structural dynamics of semiconducting organic materials for novel solar cells with improved power conversion efficiency.