History
The first neutron diffraction experiments where performed in the 1930s. However it was not until around 1945, with the advent of nuclear reactors, that high neutron fluxes became possible, leading to the possibility of in-depth structure investigations. The first neutron-scattering instruments were installed in beam tubes at multi-purpose research reactors. In the 1960s, high-flux reactors were built that were optimized for beam-tube experiments. The development culminated in the high-flux reactor of the Institut Laue-Langevin (in operation since 1972) that achieved the highest neutron flux to this date. Besides a few high-flux sources, there were some twenty medium-flux reactor sources at universities and other research institutes. Starting in the 1980s, many of these medium-flux sources were shut down, and research concentrated at a few world-leading high-flux sources.
Read more about this topic: Neutron Scattering
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)
“The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)