Meeting Information

Neutrons at NIST - Past, Present and Future

January 15, 2014
American Center for Physics
College Park, MD

Date: Wednesday, 15 January 2014

Speaker: Dr. Dan Neumann, N.I.S.T

Topic: Neutrons at NIST — Past, Present and Future

Time and Location: 1:00 pm, with Q&A to follow; in a 1st floor conference room at the American Center for Physics (www.acp.org), 1 Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD — off River Rd., between Kenilworth Ave. and Paint Branch Parkway.

Abstract: The 1950’s were a decade of rapid progress in nuclear technology with many organizations building research reactors. Among these was the National Bureau of Standards which decided to build a relatively large reactor at its new Gaithersburg campus. The reactor, completed in 1967, is now the centerpiece of the NIST Center for Neutron Research which has become one of the leading neutron facilities in the world. This national user facility now provides measurement capabilities to more than 2000 scientists and engineers from industry, academia, and government annually. In this presentation, we will describe the technical and scientific reasons for the emergence of the NCNR as a key national resource including recent research examples.

Biography: Dan Neumann received a Bachelor of Science degree from Arizona State University in 1981 and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1982 and 1987 respectively. Upon completing his PhD, he joined NIST (then NBS) as an instrument scientist at the neutron facility. In 2005, he was appointed Group Leader for Neutron Condensed Matter Science at the NIST Center for Neutron Research, overseeing a program that serves more than 2000 scientists annually. He has published 160 articles on the structure and dynamics of a wide variety of materials ranging from cement to fullerenes to those for hydrogen storage. For his many contributions, he has been elected Fellow of both the American Physical Society and the Neutron Scattering Society of America.