02 / Facility — Target Station 2

Inside Target Station 2

Opened in 2008, TS2 takes one proton pulse in five and spends it differently: everything about the station — its moderators, its guides, its instruments — is tuned for cold, long-wavelength neutrons, the kind that resolve polymers, proteins, membranes and other big, soft structures. Below, the hall is live: watch the fifth pulse turn off the main line, then step through what happens on the real clock.

TS2 · 1 — The hall, live

A working plan view

FIG TS2.1 — 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 hop by ~×1,000,000; the neutron drift by ~×100) so everything is visible at once. Counts are real ISIS figures; neutrons-per-proton uses the facility-wide ~15–20 spallation yield.

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.

TS2 · 2 — One pulse, on the real clock

100 milliseconds in the life of TS2

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 TS2 pulse and the next.

TS2 · 3 — The vitals

Same accelerator, different recipe

10 /spulses received — 1 of every 5

2008first neutrons — 3 August, seen on INTER

H₂ + CH₄liquid hydrogen & solid methane moderators

~32 kWbeam power on target — TS1 runs ~160 kW

Fewer pulses per second sounds like a downgrade — it’s the point. A 10 Hz frame is 100 ms long, so slow, long-wavelength neutrons have time to reach the detectors before the next pulse starts the clock again. Pair that with the coldest moderators on site and you get beams TS1 can’t serve.

TS2 · 4 — Who drinks from it

The instrument suite

Soft matter & large structures

SANS2D · ZOOM · LARMOR

Small-angle scattering machines — TS1’s LOQ’s bigger, colder siblings — measuring structures from nanometres up: micelles, polymers, proteins in solution.

Surfaces & interfaces

INTER · OFFSPEC · POLREF

Reflectometers that read layered films a few atoms thick — coatings, membranes, magnetic multilayers.

Structure & dynamics, served cold

WISH · NIMROD · LET

Long-wavelength diffraction for magnetism (WISH), liquids and disordered materials (NIMROD), and a cold chopper spectrometer for slow atomic motion (LET).

Imaging & irradiation

IMAT · CHIPIR

Neutron radiography/tomography (IMAT) and deliberate chip irradiation to test how electronics survive cosmic-ray neutrons (ChipIr).

Roster simplified — seven instruments opened the station in 2009, and four more (ChipIr first) were funded in March 2011. See the techniques page for what each instrument type measures.

TS2 · 5 — Checkpoint