Fission
Spallation
HiCANS
Reactor based fission neutron sources produce neutrons by nuclear fission.
Europe is hosting a suite of reactor-based neutron facilities ranging from small- and middle-scale facilities up to large scale and high-flux neutron sources like the FRM II in Garching, Germany, or the ILL High flux Reactor in Grenoble, France. These facilities serve a user community of about 8,000 users with nearly 30,000 instrument beam days each year and are the main work horses for neutrons in science and industry.
Worldwide a number of reactor-based neutron sources are in operation with similar performance as the mentioned European facilities.
Spallation neutron sources provide neutrons using protons accelerated by a high-powered accelerator and made collide into a heavy metal target (like mercury or tungsten) that “spall off” free neutrons in response to the impact.
In Europe the first of this kind of sources was ISIS in UK followed by SINQ in Switzerland which came into operation in 1985 and 1996, respectively. Worldwide spallation neutron sources can be found in USA, Japan and in China.
Powerful megawatt spallation sources have been built in the last decade as the SNS in Oak Ridge, USA, and J-PARC in Tokai-mura, Japan. Under construction is the ESS in Lund Sweden that will become the world brightest neutron source.
Neutron sources based on nuclear reactions using low energy proton beams and light elements are in operation in USA and Japan since the 90s. These sources use low energy proton accelerators in the energy range up to 7 MeV. The performance of these sources for neutron scattering experiments is mostly an order of magnitude below small reactor-based sources but allows qualified experiments on structure research and imaging.
In Europe no such kind of accelerator driven neutron source for neutron scattering applications does exist at present, but several projects aim to develop and built High Current Acclerator-based Neutron Sources (HiCANS).
