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Proposal submission

Call for proposals

The next deadline for standard proposal submission is 7 September 2022 (midnight central European time). The web system is now open all the year round. Proposals must be submitted via the Electronic Proposal Submission (EPS) system on our User Club, once you have logged in with your personal username and password. Detailed guidelines for the submission of a proposal at the ILL can be found here. Guidelines for submitting a Long Term Proposal are here.

When writing your scientific description, please use the "Times" font, size 12 (or equivalent) and make sure that the figures and their captions are clear enough. Proposals not easy to read could be rejected by the panels.

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).

Backlog accumulated before the long shut-down
Because of the specific conditions created by the pandemic over recent years, we have an unusually large backlog on several instruments. We have decided to cancel all the backlog accumulated before the current long shutdown. Please re-submit your experiment at the next round if you are concerned by this.

Low/High power cycles over the next years
The ILL will operate 3 cycles per year over the coming years. In order to maximise the number of reactor days per year, one of these cycles will be longer (about 60 days) and provide lower 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.

If you are submitting a proposal for the first time please consult our New User page.

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, SALSA
  • disordered materials diffractometer: D4
  • polarised neutron diffractometers: D3, D23*
  • single-crystal diffractometers: D9, D10
  • large scale structure diffractometers: D16, D19, LADI, DALI
  • small-angle scattering: D22, D33
  • reflectometers: SuperADAM*, D17, FIGARO
  •  imaging instrument NeXT 
  • three-axis spectrometers: IN1-LAGRANGE, IN8, IN12*, IN20, IN22*, ThALES
  • time-of-flight spectrometers: IN5, Panther
  • backscattering and spin-echo spectrometers: IN13*, IN15, IN16B, WASP
  • fundamental-physics instruments: FIPPS, PF1B, PF2, PN1, S18*

Please note that D11 will not be available until 2024, because the necessary works for the installation of the SAM instrument.
The instrument SHARP will also not be available for the next round.
D7 has been dismantled. According to the current plans, the new D007 will be installed during the second half of 2023.  If  everything goes according to plans, it will have first neutrons in 2024 and welcome users later in that year.

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.

 

New 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.

Standard Proposal submission

Proposals can be submitted all year, with deadlines in February and September.
If you are new to ILL please register as a new user via the User Club to have access to the EPS system.
Submitted proposals are judged by a Review Committee during the two proposal review rounds. Please read the detailed guidelines before submitting a proposal via the EPS system.
For any questions please do not hesitate to contact us. You will get full support from the User Club team.

At the request of the ILL Associates (FR, D, UK), the ILL had to temporarly suspend the 2/3 rule and block the submission of proposals from non member countries. It has now been decided to restablish the two third rule, starting from the next proposal round in September.

Proposals from non-member country proposers will only be guaranteed a chance of acceptance if they are part of a collaboration with at least two-thirds of the proposers coming from one of the Associate or Scientific Member Countries of the ILL.  ILL scientists listed as co-proposers are not taken into account in the calculation.
Furthermore the ILL Director retains the right to limit the number of proposals including scientists from non-members countries.

Not satisfying this rule will not be a blocking condition for proposal submissions: proposals not fulfilling the 2/3 can still be allocated time, but then from Directors discretion time. These proposals should still be reviewed by the subcommittees and they have to be truly world class and addressing hot-topics (judged by the subcommittees and the science director).
 

All proposals will be reviewed by the subcommittees of the Scientific Council, approximately 8 weeks after the deadline for submission of applications. Beamtime allocation is on the basis of scientific merit, provided the experiment proposed meets technical feasibility and safety requirements. 
Subcommittee members are specialists in the relevant areas of each college and they evaluate the proposals for scientific merit, assigning priorities and beamtime to accepted proposals. Before meeting, the subcommittee receives a report on the technical feasibility of the experiments proposed from the appropriate college at the ILL. 
Shortly after the subcommittees meeting the main proposer will be informed if his/her research proposal has been accepted. In the case of a rejection only brief general reasons are given, as the ILL declines to enter into correspondence concerning decisions made by the scientific subcommittees.

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.