Parliamentary State Secretary at BMBF Stefan Müller visits ICSP

Two Collaborative Research Projects of the Unruh Group of ICSP/CENEM funded by BMBF

Two research applications have been granted for more than 1.4 million euros by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

The funding enable the researchers of the nanomaterials characterization group to build up a particular SAXS instrument at the world leading D22 SANS instrument of the Institute Laue Langevin (ILL), Grenoble. The combined SANS/SAXS instrument will become the first instrument of its kind and allow to perform unique experiments especially in the field of soft condensed matter. For the first time simultaneous SAXS and SANS studies of the same sample volume will become possible. Thus, new insights into stochastic processes of metastable systems, the kinetics of structure formation and aging of complex colloidal systems, the details of the mesoscopic structure of dispersions and other multiphase systems, and many more nanostructured systems can be achieved. This project will be carried out in close cooperation with the instrument team of the D22 instrument in Grenoble.

The second funded project is related to the fundamentals of grazing incidence neutron and X-ray scattering (GISANS, GISAXS), respectively. The main goal is to develop a general strategy to reliably fit a 3D structural model of a studied sample to the corresponding 2D GISAS data set(s). For this purpose careful reference measurement will be performed and theoretical model concepts will be worked out and finally implemented in the open source BornAgain software in close cooperation with the Helmholtz center Geesthacht (HZG) and the scientific computing group of the MLZ at FRM II in Garching.

It was a great honor that the funding certificates were presented in a small ceremony at the chair for crystallography and structural physics by the Parliamentary State Secretary at BMBF Stefan Müller.