RITA-II

Another RITA-II beamtime

This was a hard couple of weeks! Just the day after getting home from the DanScatt meeting in Odense, I took a plane to Switzerland super-early in the morning, for a new round of beamtime at the RITA-II instrument at PSI.

Helium and nitrogen refill

Helium and nitrogen refill gives a lot of smoke

With a little help from Christof Niedermayer, I used the first couple of days to get our sample aligned and get it on a new holder (it was already aligned in the ac-plane from the last beamtime, but we needed it in the ab-plane with a certain tilt out of the plane). Astrid showed up Sunday to help. Unfortunately, somewhere in the research phase we had found the wrong diameter of the magnet we were going to use, and it turned out that we had to start all over with a much smaller holder! That was a huge setback, and we had to start almost all over with the alignment. We weren’t done yet when Linda showed up on Monday.

But we did get it working in the end, and did a lot of cool measurements on an incommensurate magnetic peak, and how it changed with applied magnetic field.

A little weekend trip to Basel

Astrid went home after the first week, leaving Linda and I to finalize the experiment (even though I guess this experiment was mostly for her project). Luckily, it was possible to script a large amount of the scans, and we actually took a whole day off to go to Basel Saturday June 9th. That was a really great little trip, and we saw a lot of fun museums and architecture – especially the Tinguely museum was interesting, with so many odd sculptures!

Another fun thing that happened was that I met Ivana (who I met at the PSI summer school in 2011) in the instrument hall! She was at a beamtime at the SANS-I instrument, doing some measurements that I really didn’t understand. But we had a little time to get some coffee at talk things over, that was nice.

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PSI detwinning beamtime

PSI detwinning beamtime

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.

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Posted by PJR in Experiments, Travel, 0 comments