More than 40 years ago Bertram N. Brockhouse and Clifford G. Shull started working separately at two of the world's first nuclear reactors, exploiting the opportunities to do basic research with the relatively large fluxes of neutrons from those machines. Their efforts helped launch the technique of neutron scattering, which is now widely used to study materials: Being uncharged, neutrons penetrate deeply to interact with the atomic nuclei of a sample, and having a magnetic moment, they also probe its magnetic structure. Today neutron scattering occupies thousands of researchers in condensed matter, materials physics, chemistry, biology and engineering (see PHYSICS TODAY, November, page 17).
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© 1994 American Institute of Physics.
1994
American Institute of Physics
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