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Large Scale Structures

Group news
(Intranet pages)

The Large Scale Structures (LSS) group operates seven public instruments and one CRG instrument, SuperAdam, that contributes 30% of their time to ILL users. The group benefits largely from in-house laboratories as the D-Lab, chemistry and the soft matter lab.

All instruments are dedicated to measuring structures on the scale of <1 to several 100 of nanometers. Information on these large scales is obtained by measuring at especially low Q, exploiting neutrons from each of the ILL reactor's cold sources.  Although the instruments all exploit cold neutrons they fall naturally into three classes:  small-angle scattering instruments, diffractometers and reflectometers.

All the machines are world leading in their kind, have a strong publication record (in terms of both quantity and quality) and high demand. All LSS instruments have been either recently built or recently upgraded.Activities within the group support a wide range of science from atomic resolution bio-macromolecular crystallography, biological structures in solution, soft condensed matter, materials science, magnetic structures and physics.A very large number of ILL students benefits from LSS instrumentation and related activities. Beamtime on the SANS machines is sometimes sold for industrial applications; the group hosts a scientist and a technician responsibles of the D50 instrument, part of the IRT-Nanoelec initiative.First-time users of the ILL are encouraged to contact one of the group scientists having a similar field of interest before submitting a proposal for use of one of the group instruments. The LSS scientists' offices are located in the joint ESRF/ILL Science Building.

The LSS works in close collaboration with the Soft Matter Science and Support (SMSS) group that has the responsibility for running the Chemistry Laboratories on the first floor of the Science Building and the Partnership for Soft Condensed Matter (PSCM) initiative on the second floor.

More extensive biochemical facilities are available in the EMBL labs on the lower floors of ILL20 and at the CIBB.