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The reactor at the Institut Laue Langevin (ILL) in Grenoble turns 40 years old
The
reactor at the Institut Laue Langevin (ILL) in Grenoble turns 40 years
old this winter, here is a great write up about one of first neutron
experiments performed there by the person who performed the experiments
at that time, read more: "Though our soap films were only a few
molecules thick and invisible to the naked eye, we could still bounce
neutrons off them with ease because we used heavy soap, where the hydrogen atoms had been replaced by the chunkier deuterium isotope.
I would sleep next to my experiment as multicoloured neutron detectors
glided across marble tanzboden ('dance floors'), all to a background
thrum of cooling pumps and fans. At different angles the number of
neutrons reflected off the film gently rose and fell. These ripples
revealed the thickness in the same way that a rainbow of colours reflect
the different thicknesses of an oil slick on water.
In one fell
swoop we had revealed the neutron's paradoxical character - a particle
that behaves like a wave - and measured the thickness of a film one
hundredth of a millionth of a metre across." : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/roger-highfield/8775120/The-physics-of-exotic-soap-bubbles.html
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