New Opportunities for Neutrons in Environmental and Biological Sciences

Highlights

● Neutrons reveal the structure and dynamics of materials nondestructively.

● Neutron methods probe complex systems across a wide range of length and time scales.

● Advances in instruments and source enable smaller samples and time-resolved studies.

● Multi-modal techniques and deuteration capabilities enable new science.

● Processes in soil, water, plants, microbes from enzymes to organisms.

Abstract

The use of neutron methods in environmental and biological sciences is rapidly emerging and accelerating with the development of new instruments at neutron user facilities. This article, based on a workshop held at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), offers insights into the application of neutron techniques in environmental and biological sciences. We highlight recent advances and identify key challenges and potential future research areas. These include soil and rhizosphere processes, root water dynamics, plant-microbe interactions, structure and dynamics of biological systems, applications in synthetic biology and enzyme engineering, next-generation bioproducts, biomaterials and bioenergy, nanoscale structure, and fluid dynamics of porous materials in geochemistry. We provide an outlook on emerging opportunities with an emphasis on new capabilities that will be enabled at the Spallation Neutron Source Second Target Station currently under design at ORNL. The mission of scientific neutron user facilities worldwide is to enable science using state-of-the-art neutron capabilities. We aim to encourage researchers in the environmental and biological research community to explore the unique capability afforded by neutrons at these facilities.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

Neutrons / Environment / Biology / Neutron imaging / Neutron scattering / Second Target Station (STS)

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the Spallation Neutron Source Second Target Station Project at ORNL and the Biological and Environmental Research Program (ERKP752 and ERKP291) within the Office of Science of the US Department of Energy (DOE). The DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan. ORNL is managed by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with DOE.

Conflict of Interests

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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