PhD@ILL | January

The thesis, entitled "Polymer based photonic materials for cold neutron optics" was developed at the ILL instrument PF2, within the Nuclear and Particle Physics group, and supervised by Martin Fally and Jürgen Klepp at the University of Vienna and Tobias Jenke at the ILL.

In his work, Elhoucine Hadden studied the diffraction of slow, so-called very cold, neutrons (VCN) at holographic gratings with the aim of developing and optimising novel neutron-optical elements. As a result, the implementation of a modern, second-generation neutron interferometry setup using VCN becomes technically feasible and is planned as a milestone for the scientific programme at PF2 in 2025. The first generation instrument was implemented by A. Zeilinger and his group at PF2 in the 1990s.