ISIS EXPLAINED
02 / Facility — Target Station 1

Inside Target Station 1

Four of every five proton pulses end their 150-metre sprint here, in a stack of tungsten plates about the size of a shoebox. This page is the hall in slow motion: watch pulses arrive, muons peel away, and eighteen beamlines drink from one target — then step through what really happens, microsecond by microsecond.

TS1 · 1 — The hall, live

A working plan view

TS1 — TARGET HALL · PLAN VIEW SCHEMATIC · NOT TO SCALE ● protons ● muons ● neutrons · colour = moderator from the synchrotron EPB1 · 150 m · 800 MeV protons · 4 of 5 pulses → TS2 · 1 in 5 pulses steel + concrete monolith SANDALS MAPS MERLIN SXD GEM PEARL POLARIS TOSCA HRPD96 m guide → ALF MARI VESUVIO ENGIN-X SURF CRISP IRIS OSIRIS LOQ Be reflector H₂O 300 K H₂O 300 K CH₄ 100 K H₂ 20 K Ta-clad W target 10 mm graphite muon target MuSR EMU HiFi EC MUON FACILITY · surface muons ARGUS CHRONUS RIKEN–RAL MUON FACILITY · decay muons
FIG TS1.1 — schematic plan, not to scale; port angles and the port-to-moderator pairing are illustrative. The animation slows each stage by a different amount (the proton dash by ~×1,000,000; the neutron drift by ~×100) so everything is visible at once. Counts are real ISIS figures.

Pick a part of the hall

Click any highlighted region — or press Tab and Enter — to see what it does. Click again or press Escape to step back out.

TS1 · 2 — One pulse, on the real clock

25 milliseconds in the life of TS1

The animation above cheats time so you can see everything at once. Here is the same story at honest timescales — click through the five beats between one pulse and the next.

TS1 · 3 — Who drinks from it

One target, twenty-odd customers

40 /spulses on target — 4 of every 5

2.5×10¹³protons per pulse (160 µA average)

~10–15neutrons chipped off per proton

18beam ports — N1–N9 & S1–S9

Where the atoms are

SANDALS · GEM · POLARIS · HRPD · SXD · PEARL · ENGIN-X · ALF

Diffractometers — they read atomic positions from how neutrons bounce off planes of atoms: liquids and glasses, powders, single crystals, samples under pressure, and stress deep inside engineering parts.

How the atoms move

MAPS · MERLIN · MARI · TOSCA · VESUVIO · IRIS · OSIRIS

Spectrometers — they measure the energy neutrons gain or lose, mapping vibrations, magnetism and chemistry in motion.

Surfaces & big structures

LOQ · CRISP · SURF

Small-angle scattering and reflectometry — polymers, proteins and layered films, hundreds of ångströms at a time.

The muon side

MuSR · EMU · HiFi | ARGUS · CHRONUS

Two muon facilities share the same proton beam upstream of the target: the EC spectrometers use surface muons, RIKEN–RAL’s ports use higher-momentum decay muons.

Roster simplified — some ports host more than one instrument, and a few test beamlines are not shown. See the techniques page for what each type of instrument measures.

TS1 · 4 — Checkpoint

Quick check