Page 60 - Neutrons for Sciences and Society

CHAPTER 3
Why invest so much money in a source of neutrons?
With the previous two chapters we have finished with prehistory and it is time to look at how the verbal agreement of Geneva materialized. Before this, it seems useful to look more closely
at what can be done with neutron beams. Shull and Wollan’s experiment mentioned above was carried out using a neutron beam from a reactor which had not been designed for this purpose. The Franco-German project was for a reactor dedicated to producing these beams at a cost (in 2005 values) of about €300M. It was necessary that justification for such an expenditure was based on a sound scientific basis. This will be the theme of this chapter, which the non-scientific reader might prefer to skip.
Neutron sources accessible to scientists are somewhat rare because they require an infrastructure almost as costly as a particle accelerator or a big telescope. However their goal is not to discover new particles and new galaxies48 , but simply to allow us to see where atoms are, and how they move, by using
48 I have re-used the comparison presented by D. Clery and G. Vogel, Science, (2003), 300, p1226-1227, DOI 10.1126/science.300.5623.1226
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