The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory conducted a series of workshops in 2013 and 2014 that engaged scientists from around the country to identify grand scientific challenges and how they might be addressed through application of neutron science.
The workshops sought to outline the most pressing challenges in the fields of quantum materials, biosciences, soft molecular matter and materials synthesis and performance. Once defined, Oak Ridge leaders hope to push the limits of neutron science and associated analytical techniques in order to address them over the next decade, said Ramamoorthy Ramesh, ORNL’s deputy director for science and technology, who helped organize the series.
One emerging theme in the reports of all four earlier workshops is the importance of high-performance computing (HPC), modeling, and simulation to enabling high-impact science. Neutron scattering intensities can be calculated straightforwardly from materials models, making the neutron a unique probe for model validation. As a result the overarching grand challenge workshop Frontiers in Data, Modeling and Simulation was held in Spring 2015.
Here are reports from each of the workshops:
+ Quantum Condensed Matter: December 9 -10, 2013 at Univ. California, Berkeley: Download the pdf file (1 MB)
+ Grand Challenges in Biological Neutron Scattering: January 17 - 18, 2014 at Univ. of California, San Diego: Download the pdf file (700 KB)
+ Grand Challenges in Soft Matter: May 17 - 18, 2014 at Univ. of California, Santa Barbara: Download the pdf file (2.2 MB)
+ Frontiers in Materials Discovery, Characterization and Application: August 2-3, 2014 at Univ. of Chicago and Argonne National Lab: Download the pdf file (1.7 MB)
+ Frontiers in Data, Modeling, and Simulation: March 30 - 31, 2015 at Argonne National Laboratory: Download the pdf file (1.3 MB)
