Yesterday, I returned from a long week in Switzerland, where I’ve been on a beamtime at the RITA-II instrument at the SINQ neutron source at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI).
I was there along with Astrid T. Rømer and Linda Udby, doing measurements on three different LSCO crystals. We tried detwinning them using magnetic fields, but it ended up not working at all.. Week well spent! Well, at least I got some training in aligning single crystals, and we did get some beautiful data.
We’ll have to look at some different techniques for measuring detwinning than neutron scattering (possibly dilatometry), before we want to do anything with neutrons again.