Firstly, I realized how easy to do international travel now. I can use my credit card issued by Australian bank as long as I can tell them where I am. I have real a US$20 but I haven’t used it for 3 days. Since the USD is very strong now I don’t want to see the bill now. But I will get per-diem by USD, it should be O.K. Since I found it is easy to travel to the U.S., if you want to travel for vacation, please let me know, I would love to join.
The goal of this trip is collecting data for local structure analysis. I can’t say the project but I am measuring one of Type-1 multiferroic and also frustrated magnetic materials by using so called Pair Density Function analysis techniques (PDF). The PDF analysis is kind of new techniques to structure of material. Originally, it was developed for disordered materials such as, gasses, amorphous, liquid, glasses, and so on to see the short range order of materials. I am applying it for crystallized materials which are long range. Actually by definition, the crystal orders infinite range. If you are familiar about scattering techniques on material science, you should know Rietveld analysis method. Basically, Rietveld analysis cares Bragg scattering which is, by definition, the intensity is coming from infinitive layers in crystal. However, PDF doesn’t care about Bragg scattering, we are basically analyzing the background. We can get information about structure by doing Fourier transform of background. To do that, we need high momentum transfer, basically we can only do it with spallation neutron source, such as SNS (U.S.A), J-PARC (JAPAN), ISIS (U.K). One of my advantage is I can use both analysis method, so I can get complete data set to know the structures of material very well.
I am planning to do experiment with the same material with different instrument in Australia, November 2015. I am doing elastic (not exactly elastic though) neutron scattering now, to know the structure of the material. And, I will do inelastic neutron scattering in Australia to know how the structure behave. We prepared 3 compositions of the sample should be same structure according to structural analysis for long range ordered. I believe short range order of this system is different what people currently know.
My original schedule was 9/18 Friday morning – 9/21 Monday morning. When I got there on Wednesday night, one of my friends told me that there was a problem on the instrument. On Thursday morning, I went to instrument I heard they had a problem on shutter wasn’t working. They fixed the problem until Friday night. We started experiment Friday night and stayed overnight. I was very impressed because the problem was not easy to be fixed. The shutter is between Hg target and detectors under the large Fe shield. They opened the Fe shield and fixed the problem just in two days. So I can start my experiment just 12 hours delay. They spent 6-7 engineer and 3-4 scientists to fix the problem. So, I believe I spent a lot of resources from American, only I can do is do my best science. Let’s publish the paper!!
I need to finish one more paper on my project which I used PDF technique and I will add more from this experiment. Currently, the instrument is working well. I will am leaving the U.S. tomorrow afternoon.