In recent days the CAS Academician Chen Hesheng alongside with Prof. Xun-li Wang from the City University of Hong Kong, wrote an article introducing the brand new state-of-the-art scientific facility, the China Spallation Neutron Source (CSNS). This article was published on Nature.

The CSNS project is led by IHEP, with a budget of 2.3 billion RMB. It is composed of an 80 MeV Hˉ linac, a 1.6 GeV rapid cycling synchrotron (RCS), and a target station with 3 initial instruments for neutron scattering research. Starting in September 2011, the CSNS team has spent more than 6 years in the project construction, and has finished the facility and infrastructure construction.

A "super microscope" for looking into the microstructure of materials, the CSNS has a wide range of application prospects, including in life sciences, physics, chemistry, resources and the environment, and new energy. It will become a core part of the national science and technology industry innovation center currently being developed in Guangdong Province, and will make significant contributions to the development of technology and industry in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area.

The first neutron beam was obtained at CSNS on August 28, 2017. In November 2017, a joint beam commissioning of the accelerators, target station and instruments was performed at the repetition rate of 25 Hz, with a stable beam power of above 10 kW, meeting the acceptance goal. During the Spring Festival holiday in February 2018, the CSNS team worked overtime and continued to perform commissioning. Sample experiments were successfully conducted using the initial three neutron instruments - the General-Purpose Powder Diffractometer (GPPD), Small-Angle Neutron Scattering instrument (SANS), and multi-purpose reflectometer (MR). Two high-level user sample experiments have now been completed at the GPPD, and it is expected that the facility will soon be widely used by domestic and international researchers.

The full article can be found here: http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/v15/n7/full/nmat4655.html