Recent Progress and Highlights from Taiwan’s cold neutron triple axis spectrometer SIKA at ANSTO

Triple axis spectrometers have been one of most versatile neutron scattering instruments for many areas of condensed matter physics. With using cold neutron, triple axis spectrometer can investigate physical phenomena with high energy and momentum resolution. 

 In this presentation, I present Taiwanese built cold triple axis spectrometer SIKA at OPAL reactor in Australian Nuclear Science and technology (ANSTO). The SIKA project has been funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology Taiwan to build a cold neutron triple-axis spectrometer at the OPAL reactor in ANSTO since 2005. We are now running user program since 2015 July. The components, capabilities, sample environment, software, and statistics will be presented in this talk. 

 Then, I present some of our recent scientific outcomes from SIKA. We are working on magnetic scattering from low dimensional Cu spin chain systems with dilution fridge, new Kagome lattice antiferromagnets under magnetic field, magnon excitations from thin-films and single crystals, phonon dispersion from thermoelectric materials, and so on. We are expecting more to come. 

After that, I present current issues on SIKA. We are working on several upgrades. To accommodate ³He Polarization analysis system, we are implementing automation of arms for sample stage and analyzer drum. Also, position sensitive detector (PSD) is under repair. With using PSD, SIKA will have capability of multiplexing analyzers. The progress from these commissioning will be presented.

 Finally, we would like to cultivate users. We are getting healthy number of Taiwanese users while we would like to have more users from the other Asian countries. I hope audience in this seminar will be interested in SIKA. 

References

[1] SIKA-the multiplexing cold-neutron triple-axis spectrometer at ANSTO; C.-M. Wu,G. Deng, J.S. Gardner,P. Vorderwisch, W.-H. Li, S. Yano, J.-C. Peng and E. Imamovicc; Journal of Instrumentation, Volume 11,P10009October (2016)