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Standard access

Standard proposal submission

Standard proposals submission deadlines

Proposals can be submitted all year, with deadlines in February and September.

Next proposal deadline will be on  Monday 15 September 2025 (midnight, CET).

Submit your proposal via the User Club. Check for more detailed information.
 

Proposal submission guidelines HERE
Proposal writing hints HERE

In case of problems, you will receive full support from the User Club team (club@remove-this.ill.eu). Please allow sufficient time for any unforeseen computing hitches. For other queries, contact the User Office (user-office@remove-this.ill.eu).

Medium/High power cycles 
In order to maximise the number of reactor days per year, some reactor cycles will last 60 days and provide medium power (about 20% less). You can now tick a box on the proposal form to inform us that your experiment is NOT FEASIBLE with reduced reactor power. Please tick the box if necessary and explain why in the comment box or in your scientific description.

Technical form
A specific technical form (doc - 87 Ki) (rtf - 88 Ki) is to be filled in by all users who plan to provide their own experimental set-up. You may use the form to describe the experimental set-up in some detail, and insert a sketch of your apparatus if you think it useful.

Please be aware of these important requirements when writing your proposal:

1.Supervisors of PhD students who submit proposals must demonstrate their involvement in the project by being listed as proposers and actively participating in the experiment.

2. In your scientific explanation, it would be helpful to add a brief section outlining the roles and responsibilities of each person participating in the proposal or experiment.

3. We remind you that - for multi-instruments proposals - you should  make sure that the scientific case, experimental plan and time requested is sufficiently detailed for each instrument.
If the available space is not enough, consider submitting different proposals for different instruments.

4. To ensure the best possible outcomes, we strongly encourage you to reach out to our facility scientist before finalising and submitting your proposal. Engaging with our facility scientist can significantly enhance the clarity and feasibility of your project, especially in cases where technically challenging or complex set-ups are involved. This collaboration will not only refine your proposal but also increase its chances of success.

Last but not least :  When submitting a proposal, you are required to accept and adhere to theILL Access and Publication Policy (pdf - 168 Ki). Compliance with this policy is mandatory, and you will be asked to abide by its terms throughout your project.

New and upgraded instruments now available!

The new MoTo instrument will be available as a second (monochromatic) imaging station at the ILL.
Additionally, the newly upgraded  D007 and SHARPER (formerly SHARP) are back in operation. The instrument teams eagerly await your proposals!
On D007, a limited number of days will be allocated for subcommittee use during the third cycle. As commissioning progresses, we may have the opportunity to increase availability.
For more information on instruments and equipment availability, please see below.

Instruments and equipments available

The following instruments will be available for the forthcoming round. You will find details of the instruments here.
Instruments marked with an asterisk * in the list are CRG instruments, where a smaller amount of beamtime is available than on ILL-funded instruments, but we encourage applications for these.

  • powder diffractometers: D1B*, D2B, D20, XtremeD*
  • disordered materials diffractometer: D4
  • polarised neutron diffractometer: D3
  • diffuse scattering diffractometer: D007, depending on commissioning phase
  • single-crystal diffractometers: D9, D10, D23*
  •  strain imaging diffractometer SALSA
  • large scale structure diffractometers: D16, LADI, DALI
  • small-angle scattering: D11, D22, D33, SAM*
  • reflectometers: SuperADAM*, D17, FIGARO
  •  imaging instrument NeXT, MoTo
  • three-axis spectrometers: IN8, IN12*, IN20, IN22*, ThALES
  •  vibrational spectrometer: IN1-Lagrange
  • time-of-flight spectrometers: IN5, PANTHER, SHARPER*
  • backscattering and spin-echo spectrometers: IN13*, IN15, IN16B, WASP
  • fundamental-physics instruments: FIPPS, PF1B, PF2, PN1, SUPERSUN, S18*

D4 and IN1-Lagrange share the same beamtube, therefore they are operated for 50% of the total available beamtime.
The instrument D19 is available to the user programme since 2024. D3, D9 and IN8 will operate for 50% of the time.

40 Tesla / 2K cryomagnet available on IN22: a pulsed horizontal field cryomagnet developed by LNCMI Toulouse and the ILL is available to ILL Users. Experiments with this magnet can be performed on IN22 in collaboration with LNCMI who provides and operates the power supply. If you wish to submit a proposal, please contact both Fabienne DUC (LNCMI, Toulouse) and Frédéric BOURDAROT (CEA, Grenoble) to prepare your proposal. The equipment can only be used with support from LNCMI, therefore a LNCMI person will be included in the proposal and experimental team.
Please select the environment code 'Cryomagnet, Pulsed Horizontal Field < 40 T' if you want to use this option.
More information here.

For soft matter and biology users: an extensive library of hydrogenous and deuterated lipids from natural extracts is available for neutron scattering experiments from the L-Lab at the ILL. You can find the list at http://www.ill.eu/L-Lab. If the compound you are looking for is not in the list, please contact lipids@remove-this.ill.fr.

Consumables for ILL experiments
More information can be found here.

Collection of information on the funding behind UK users
The UK is implementing a new funding model for large facilities. As part of this process, the STFC is required to be able to provide information to the other UK research councils on the users of the national and international facilities the STFC supports, including being able to link facility access proposals to the related research council grant where appropriate. To do this, STFC will have to collect a full set of data on the UK users of each facility. The full set of data is based mainly on what is already collected by the facilities (statistics on beamtime allocation, its distribution over different UK laboratories and so on), with the addition of the clear link to the source of UK funding underpinning the research in question.
To help STFC collect this information, we now ask all UK users to provide details on the source of the funding of their research (when applicable) when they submit their proposal form to the ILL. The information is "compulsory" for all UK main proposers. It is not compulsory at the submission stage for UK co-proposers, but they will be asked to provide this information prior to using the facility, e.g. at the invitation stage.

In order to demonstrate the 'innovation potential' of neutron scattering, we are particularly keen to know if your academic research is directly linked to industry.
This is most obvious if you have industry sponsorship, for example, for students or samples.
Please use the tick-box on the proposal form and give appropriate information in the text box, including if possible the name of the company you are working with. ILL would like to use this information to promote the use of neutrons by industry via academia.

We have appended new codes for the sample environment equipment available at the ILL. A wider choice of equipment is now available for experiments performed close to ambient conditions.
We would very much appreciate that you take the time to check this list and identify the codes which best match your needs.