AN ASSESSMENT OF THE 

NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF STANDARDS 

AND TECHNOLOGY 

CENTER FOR NEUTRON RESEARCH 

FISCAL YEAR 2007 

Panel on Neutron Research 

Laboratory Assessments Board 

Division on Engineering and Physical Sciences 

 

THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES PRESS 

Washington, D.C. 

www.nap.edu 
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members of the board responsible for the report were chosen for their special competences and 

with regard for appropriate balance. 

This study was supported by Contract No. SB134106Z0011 between the National Academy of 

Sciences and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, an agency of the U.S. 

Department of Commerce. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed 

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that provided support for the project. 

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are chair and vice chair, respectively, of the National Research Council. 

www.national-academies.org 
iv 

PANEL ON NEUTRON RESEARCH 

PHILIP PINCUS, University of California, Santa Barbara, Chair

TONYA KUHL, University of California, Davis 

HERBERT MOOK, Oak Ridge National Laboratory 

V. ADRIAN PARSEGIAN, National Institute of Child Health and Development 

R.G. HAMISH ROBERTSON, University of Washington 

KENNETH C. ROGERS, Commissioner, U.S. Nuclear Energy Commission (retired) 

BARBARA WYSLOUZIL, The Ohio State University 

Staff 

JAMES P. McGEE, Director 

ARUL MOZHI, Senior Program Officer

LIZA HAMILTON, Administrative Coordinator 
v 

Acknowledgment of Reviewers 

This report has been reviewed in draft form by individuals chosen for their 

diverse perspectives and technical expertise, in accordance with procedures approved by 

the National Research Council’s Report Review Committee. The purpose of this 

independent review is to provide candid and critical comments that will assist the 

institution in making its published report as sound as possible and to ensure that the 

report meets institutional standards for objectivity, evidence, and responsiveness to the 

study charge. The review comments and draft manuscript remain confidential to protect 

the integrity of the deliberative process. We wish to thank the following individuals for 

their review of this report: 

Stuart G. Bush, Rohm and Haas Corporation, 

David Chandler, University of California, Berkeley, 

Seb Doniach, Stanford University, 

Zachary Fisk, University of California, Irvine, and 

Lyle H. Schwartz, Air Force Office of Scientific Research (retired). 

Although the reviewers listed above have provided many constructive comments 

and suggestions, they were not asked to endorse the conclusions or recommendations, nor 

did they see the final draft of the report before its release. The review of this report was 

overseen by Alton Slay, Warrenton, Virginia. Appointed by the National Research 

Council, he was responsible for making certain that an independent examination of this 

report was carried out in accordance with institutional procedures and that all review 

comments were carefully considered. Responsibility for the final content of this report 

rests entirely with the authoring committee and the institution. 

vii 

Contents 

SUMMARY 1 

CHARGE TO THE PANEL AND DESCRIPTION OF THE ASSESSMENT 2 

PROCESS 

GENERAL ASSSESSMENT 4 

FACILITIES AND PERSONNEL 5 

NCNR AS A USER FACILITY 7 

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY AT THE NCNR 9 

CONCLUSIONS 11 

1 

Summary 

The NIST Center for Neutron Research (NCNR) continues to be well run. It 

consistently and reliably provides a high flux of neutrons to an evolving suite of highquality instruments. There is a substantial and well-satisfied external user community. 

The in-house science and technology is robust. The new organizational structure—the 

NCNR director now reports directly to the Director of the National Institute of Standards 

and Technology (NIST)—demonstrates NIST recognition of the strength of the facility 

and allows a more efficient means for the facility to interact synergistically with the 

broad NIST complex. Ground will soon be broken for a substantial expansion of the 

guide hall, complemented by the construction of a new set of instruments. With this 

expansion and by continuing to serve the broad neutron scattering community, the NCNR 

is likely to remain an important neutron source and knowledge base for years to come. 

As the NCNR proceeds with the expansion of the guide hall, it should continue to 

• Develop consortia with industrial, academic, and government laboratories to 

leverage new instrument development and construction. 

• Interface with the user community for identification and selection of new 

instruments. 

• Recruit instrument scientists and engineers to construct, operate, and maintain 

new instruments. 

• Work to maintain the necessary scientific openness of the facility within the 

constraints of increasing security demands. 

The NCNR should also 

• Aggressively pursue its small grants program to enhance sample environment 

capabilities and to improve data analysis programs. 

• Continue to add instruments to the user suite, including thermal neutron 

spectrometers. 

• Aggressively pursue a replacement for the National Institutes of 

Health/National Center for Research Resources (NIH/NCRR) grant in 

biological materials. 

• Develop a center for soft matter and biological physics to complement NCNR 

capabilities. 
2 

Charge to the Panel and Description of the Assessment Process 

At the request of NIST, the National Academies, through its National Research 

Council (NRC), has since 1959 annually assembled panels of experts from academia, 

industry, medicine, and other scientific and engineering environments to assess the 

quality and effectiveness of the NIST measurements and standards laboratories, of which 

there are now eight,1 as well as the adequacy of the laboratories’ resources. In 2007 

NIST requested that four of its laboratories be assessed: the NCNR, the Information 

Technology Laboratory, the Chemical Science and Technology Laboratory, and the 

Electronics and Electrical Engineering Laboratory. Each laboratory was assessed by a 

separate panel of experts, and the findings of each panel are summarized in separate 

reports. This report summarizes the findings of the Panel on Neutron Research. 

NIST requested that the panel consider the following criteria as part of its 

assessment: 

1. The degree to which the Laboratory programs in measurement science, 

standards, and technology address national priorities. 

2. The degree to which the Laboratory programs in measurement science, 

standards, and technology are well-motivated with regard to the following 

questions: 

a. What is the program trying to accomplish? 

b. What is innovative or different, as compared to efforts at other institutions, 

about the program’s approach that will lead to success? 

c. Is success well defined? 

d. What will be the impact of success? 

e. How will success be disseminated to end users? 

f. How much will success cost, and how long will it take? 

3. The technical merit of the Laboratory programs relative to the current state of 

the art worldwide. 

4. Insofar as they affect the quality of the technical programs, the adequacy of 

the Laboratories’ facilities, equipment, and human resources. 

To accomplish the assessment, the NRC appointed a panel of seven volunteers 

whose expertise matched that of the work performed by NCNR staff. The panel 

members visited the NCNR facility for a day and a half, during which time they attended 

presentations, tours, demonstrations, and interactive sessions with NCNR staff. 

Subsequently, the panel members assembled for another day, when they conducted 

interactive sessions with NCNR managers and with leaders of NCNR user groups; the 

panel also met at this time in a closed session to deliberate its findings and to define the 

contents of this assessment report. 

 1

The eight NIST laboratories are the Building and Fire Research Laboratory, the Chemical Science 

and Technology Laboratory, the Electronics and Electrical Engineering Laboratory, the Information 

Technology Laboratory, the Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory, the Materials Science and Engineering 

Laboratory, the NIST Center for Neutron Research, and the Physics Laboratory. 
3 

The panel’s approach to the assessment relied upon the experience, technical 

knowledge, and expertise of its members, whose backgrounds were carefully matched to 

the technical areas of NCNR activities. The panel reviewed selected examples of the 

standards and measurements activities and the technological research presented by the 

NCNR; it was not possible to review the NCNR programs and projects exhaustively. The 

panel’s goal was to identify and report salient examples of accomplishments and 

opportunities for further improvement with respect to the technical merit of the NCNR 

work, its perceived relevance to NIST’s own definition of its mission in support of 

national priorities, and apparent specific elements of the NCNR’s resource infrastructure 

that is intended to support the technical work. These highlighted examples, for each 

NCNR division, are intended to collectively portray an overall impression of the 

laboratory while preserving useful suggestions specific to projects and programs that the 

panel considered to be of special note within the set of those examined. The assessment 

is currently scheduled to be repeated annually; while the panel applied a largely 

qualitative rather than quantitative approach to the assessment, it is possible that future 

assessments will be informed by further consideration of various analytical methods that 

can be applied. 

 This report is organized in four sections: general assessment comments, facilities 

and personnel, NCNR as a user facility, and science and technology at NCNR. The 

comments in this report are intended not to exhaustively address each program within 

NCNR but to identify key issues, salient programs, and the projects relevant to those 

issues. Detailed information on NCNR activities and programs can be found on its Web 

site, www.ncnr.nist.gov, or in published documents. NCNR’s annual report in particular 

highlights scientific research at the Center, lists publications, provides current research 

titles, and gives information on instrumentation and other developments. 
4 

General Assessment 

The NCNR management defined the mission of the laboratory as follows: 

The mission of the NIST Center for Neutron Research is to assure the availability 

of neutron measurement capabilities to meet the needs of U.S. researchers from 

industry, university, and other Government agencies. Toward this end, the 

NCNR operates the NIST Research Reactor cost effectively while assuring the 

safety of the staff and general public; develops neutron measurement techniques, 

develops new applications of these techniques, and applies them to science and 

engineering problems of national interest; and serves the needs of researchers 

from industry, university, and government by operating the research facilities of 

the Center as a national facility. 

NCNR continues to be a well-run facility. It consistently and reliably provides a 

high flux of neutrons to an evolving suite of high-quality instruments. There is a 

substantial and well-satisfied external user community. The new organization structure 

(the NCNR director now reports directly to the NIST director) demonstrates NIST’s 

recognition of the strength of the facility and allows a more efficient means for the 

facility to interact synergistically with the broad NIST complex. An enhanced coupling 

of NCNR to NIST organizational units is apparent since the last review. The substantial 

expansion of the guide hall, complemented by the construction of a new set of 

instruments, was partially a result of the strong endorsement of NCNR by the Office of 

Science and Technology Policy’s Interagency Working Group on Neutron Science.2

 As 

detailed by that group, the United States has been neutron poor in the recent past. With 

the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) coming on line and the NCNR expansion, this 

situation is markedly improving. By continuing to serve the broad neutron scattering 

community, NCNR is likely to remain an important neutron source and knowledge base 

for years to come. 

The SNS is coming on line now with only three instruments (two reflectometers 

and one back-scattering instrument) and will take years to be fully operational at 

1.4 MW. It is imperative that the user community continue to grow and be served by the 

existing facilities in order to take advantage of the SNS at full operation. In addition, the 

impending loss of neutron sources Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Internal 

Pulsed Neutron Source at Argonne National Laboratory will only be offset by the SNS. 

The United States is neutron poor and needs all the facilities operating well to serve the 

U.S. science community. NCNR and the expansion are important for maintaining the 

research capacity and for providing neutrons to the broad scientific community. 

 2

Interagency Working Group on Neutron Science, Office of Science and Technology Policy, 2002, 

Report on the Status and Needs of Major Neutron Scattering Facilities and Instruments in the United 

States. 
5 

Facilities and Personnel 

The NCNR operates 24 beam instruments that cover a broad range of energies, 

resolutions, and capabilities. The NCNR expansion project will increase the cold neutron 

user facilities by 30 percent to help meet the needs of the growing neutron scattering 

community. The expansion will add a new cold source, guide, and guide hall and will 

also allow optimization of the existing instruments across the aggregate flight paths. This 

optimization includes separation of high magnetic field instruments to minimize cross 

talk with magnetically sensitive instruments and experiments. To operate the five new 

funded instruments will require hiring additional staff and a significant increase in 

operating funds. Continuation of strong staff support to users will be important for 

maintaining the quality of the science program and output of the NCNR. Partnerships 

with industry and the formation of consortia will allow the number of instruments to be 

increased through leveraging (there is currently funding for 5 but space for 10) and 

should be aggressively pursued. NCNR management is well aware of the impact of the 

SNS on the neutron program and is choosing instrumentation in the expansion project 

that will complement the new source. Nevertheless it is important that each instrument is 

developed with a clear understanding of its existing user community at present and its 

expected growth. Sustained and robust interaction with the user community is essential 

for maximizing the number of instruments and their suitability for meeting the needs of 

various constituents. Current staff levels are unlikely to be sufficient to meet the needs of 

the user program and also support the design and construction of the new suite of 

instruments. It is therefore essential that NCNR staff be expanded to design, build, and 

support these new instruments and maintain the high level of service to the user 

community. Moreover, in addition to recruiting design and construction engineers for the 

new beam lines and instruments, NCNR must aggressively recruit instrument scientists to 

interface with the user community as well as optimize the science capabilities of the new 

tools. 

 There has long been an issue of the sufficiency of the numbers of scientists and 

engineers who are trained and have expertise in neutron scattering science and 

instrumentation. A contributing factor is that most neutron sources are not at universities 

but at national laboratories. In order to address this issue, NCNR has been actively 

pursuing an outreach program that is designed to provide education in the neutron 

scattering arena. This includes the yearly summer school at the Center for High 

Resolution Neutron Scattering (CHRNS) for graduate students and postdocs; there is also 

a summer undergraduate research fellowship administered by NIST. 

 The new expansion of the experimental facilities, the increased security systems, 

and important ongoing maintenance are all competing for the extant in-house pool of 

skilled engineers. While funding for increasing the engineering staff does not appear to 

be a serious difficulty, competing successfully against the many other industry, 

government, and university groups now aggressively hiring engineers with nuclear 

experience will be increasingly difficult. At the present time several additional engineers 

are needed to meet the projected workload. 

 The reactor is well maintained and skillfully operated and was available for 

research during 2006 on 266 of a possible 267 days (99 percent availability). Budget 
6 

allocations for routine operations have been adequate, with a 3-4 percent increase in 2006 

over 2005. Reserve stockpiles of heavy water and reactor fuel of the type for which it 

was designed are sufficient for a complete change-out of the heavy water inventory, and 

enough fresh fuel has been manufactured for several years of operations. Planning for 

coolant systems modifications and rerouting necessitated by the expansion of the guide 

hall/experimental area is well in hand. It is based on allowing as much time as possible 

for making final decisions on the specifications of the new instruments to be located 

there. 
7 

NCNR as a User Facility 

The NCNR is a national center for research that provides the advanced 

measurement capability of thermal and cold neutrons to researchers from industry, 

universities, and government agencies. It plays a key role in fulfilling the NIST mission, 

to promote U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement 

science, standards, and technology and the American Competitiveness Initiative by 

providing a facility and a wide and evolving array of neutron instruments that enable 

fundamental scientific discovery and the development of new technologies. 

 A broad and vibrant user community makes use of the instrument suite at NCNR. 

Oversubscription of the available instruments and insufficient staff to support NCNR 

users continue to be a concern. The number of proposals submitted has almost doubled 

over the past 5 years, and the instruments were oversubscribed by a factor of 2.2, on 

average, in 2006. The expansion and the reliability enhancement projects are crucial for 

maintaining NCNR’s vigor and scientific output. 

 The NCNR user program has grown steadily and served approximately 850 

physical users during 2006. A recent survey conducted by the NCNR User Group 

Executive Committee in March 2007 demonstrated that the users are well served. 

Typical responses rated the training, instruments, and facilities as good to excellent. 

Importantly, NCNR staff have consistently been evaluated as excellent by the majority of 

users according to user surveys in 2004 and 2007. The chair of the committee that 

allocates beam time mentioned to the panel that a strength and driver of the user program 

has been the strong staff support and the well-organized, critical, and external review 

process of user proposals. He noted that the research community believes the proposal 

process is reasonable and fair. A novel concept to further strengthen the scientific output 

of the facility is the ongoing development of a science group whose leaders range across 

a spectrum of strong NCNR scientists and whose overarching goals are to produce highimpact science, develop new partnerships and proposals for new funding, guide 

development of instruments, and conduct outreach to grow and support the burgeoning 

neutron scattering community. 

In the 2007 user survey, the need for additional specialty sample environments 

was mentioned a number of times. In response, NCNR announced (on www.grants.gov) 

it is giving small grants to develop and build sample environments. The small grants 

program initiated by the NCNR facility is an excellent and innovative method of 

leveraging expertise in the user community to provide enhanced sample environment 

development and capabilities. If successful, this program could be expanded to address 

stated needs for improved data analysis programs. 

 The NSF-supported CHRNS program is a positive example of synergistic activity 

between government agencies. New ways must be found to support the NCNR expansion 

project and maintain its robust scientific output. Such collaborative interactions are also 

indispensable for supporting new users. 

NCNR’s policy that allocates some fraction of the available beam time for an 

increasing number of instruments to the general user pool is laudable and should be 

extended. In particular, the thermal neutron instruments should be added to this suite. 
8 

Technical staff should be hired so that the scientific staff have time for the users as well 

as for their own scientific undertakings. 

Since the last NCNR review, the committee has observed an enhanced 

responsiveness of other NIST divisions to collaborations with NCNR. Last year, 

5 percent of the NCNR participants were from NIST (non-NCNR). Some of the 

collaborating divisions are Analytical Chemistry, Ionizing Radiation, Biochemical 

Science, and divisions within the Electronics and Electrical Engineering Laboratory. The 

Polymer Division continues its strong involvement with NCNR. 

All nuclear reactors have had to increase the strength and reliability of their 

security systems in the face of possible harmful intrusion attempts. NCNR has responded 

by investing in many new systems and components. However, as a facility with a strong 

commitment to providing excellent facilities and services to its industry-, government-, 

and university-based users, it can only successfully meet their needs by operating with a 

substantial degree of openness. A reasonable and stable balance between highly secure 

and very open operations must be found to avoid creating a sterile fortress. While steady 

improvements in the scientific capabilities of the facility are justifiable, endless additions 

to the security systems could severely interfere with the facility’s ability to achieve its 

mission, and care must be exercised to avoid such an unfortunate outcome. 
9 

Science and Technology at the NCNR 

NCNR admirably balances attention to development, construction, and 

maintenance with support of a broad range of scientific and technical investigations. 

Much of the successful balance is due to carefully constructed cooperation with the many 

beam users who bring samples for short visits. From this visiting population and its own 

research staff, the NCNR management chooses the best kinds of target stations to serve 

scientific needs. Particularly because the SNS will be filling many needs, the NCNR has 

thoughtfully chosen to build detectors and to develop facilities specifically for the many 

investigations that will not be optimally served by the SNS. In so doing, the facility has 

earned high priority for support within NIST. 

Because of the very broad range of topics being addressed at NCNR and its 

members’ wish for substance in presentation, the panel heard descriptions of only about 

half of the research activities conducted at the NCNR. The facility is providing excellent 

data, for example, on the states of water at low temperature and in the vicinity of 

macromolecules. It is bringing a better view of proteins in solutions, particularly as 

distinct from crystal structures, and is revealing new levels of polymer organization that 

correlate with the toughness of materials. The renowned work on multiferroics, materials 

that show ferromagnetic and ferroelectric properties, is progressing rapidly. 

The NCNR hosts fundamental physics studies of the properties of the neutron, as 

well as a number of more applied physics measurements, on a total of seven ports. The 

cold beam lines (NG-6 and -7) are a world-class site for basic physics with the neutron, 

competitive with the Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) in Grenoble, France. 

The neutron lifetime and a set of parameters describing correlations between the 

neutron spin and the kinematic parameters of the decay electron, proton, and antineutrino 

provide the most model-independent source of information on the unitarity of the 

Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix, which in turn is an avenue to extensions of the 

standard model. The Standard Model is now known to be broken with the discovery of 

neutrino mass and oscillations, and it is important to find other deviations in order to 

advance to a new, correct, and predictive model. The neutron lifetime has long been a 

topic of study at NIST, although the most precise measurements (which do not mutually 

agree) were made at ILL. To resolve this situation, NIST and a group of universities are 

developing a new measurement based on magnetically trapped ultracold neutrons. 

Perhaps the most important neutron physical parameter for the new physics is a 

possible electric dipole moment (EDM), which would be zero if nature respected the 

symmetry CP (charge conjugation and parity reversal). This bears directly on the 

question of why the universe contains matter but essentially no antimatter, because it 

would reveal a source of CP violation larger than the (inadequate) amount contained 

within the Standard Model. A large U.S. neutron EDM project is planned for the SNS, 

but NIST scientists in collaboration with other universities and Argonne National 

Laboratory are investigating a completely different approach that might be as sensitive 

and that would have different systematics. A proof-of-principle test is a measurement of 

the magnetic dipole moment. This creative approach and plan hold promise. This 

experiment has been approved and is under development at the NCNR. 
10 

There is an initiative to develop high-capacity hydrogen storage for fuel cells, 

small relative to the amount of work being done by industry but critical for the systematic 

investigation that is possible at the NCNR. 

Of concern to the panel and to the staff at NIST was the loss of an NIH/NCRR 

grant for the study of biological materials. The formal consortium operating the AND/R 

instrument has ended, and NIST is concerned about losing momentum in this research 

area. Appropriately, NCNR wants to continue its biological work and is trying to forge 

new associations. An important opportunity will be lost if the NIH grant cannot be 

replaced. The ongoing collaboration between NCNR and both the Child Health and 

Human Development Institute and the Cancer Institute at the NIH is a positive sign for 

the restoration of funding. 

Within the larger purview of soft materials, NCNR should develop more 

relationships with leaders in the field to enhance and drive science. What is needed is a 

strong biology and soft matter center to complement the capabilities at NCNR. There are 

already productive interactions with the Biochemical Science Division at the NIST 

Chemical Science and Technology Laboratory. With characteristic foresight, NCNR is 

now interviewing candidates for a scientist who will take a permanent staff position and 

who will lead the soft matter research. Other mechanisms such as visiting scholars and 

systematic visits with nearby institutions such as the NIH can be created to allow NCNR 

to build a center of excellence. 

The science and technology to which the panel was exposed are strong. In 2006 

there were 35 papers in high-impact journals (Nature, Physical Review Letters, Science, 

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Journal of the American 

Chemical Society). Taking into account the aforementioned soft matter and biological 

sciences, it can be judged that science is healthy at NCNR. 
11 

Conclusions 

The NCNR continues to be well run. It consistently and reliably provides a high 

flux of neutrons to an evolving suite of high-quality instruments. There is a substantial 

and well-satisfied external user community. The in-house science and technology is 

robust. The new organizational structure (the NCNR director now reports directly to the 

NIST director) demonstrates NIST recognition of the strength of the facility and allows a 

more efficient means for the facility to interact synergistically with the entire NIST 

complex. Ground will soon be broken for a substantial expansion of the guide hall, 

complemented by the construction of a new set of instruments. With this expansion and 

by continuing to serve the broad neutron scattering community, the NCNR is likely to 

remain an important neutron source and knowledge base for years to come.