Who are the national and international research facility users?

Friday 10 February 2012

Numbers of users of facilities. Diagonal elements show the number of unique users per facility. Off-diagonal elements show the number of common users of two facilities, or class of facilities.

STFC operate large national facilities including the Diamond Light Source (DLS) and the ISIS neutron and muon facility. We also provide access for UK scientists to international facilities including the ILL neutron source and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble. These four facilities all provide ways for scientists in the physical and life sciences to allow the properties of materials to be understood at the scale of atoms. Scientists use these facilities to research into subjects ranging from clean energy and the environment, pharmaceuticals and health care, through to nanotechnology, materials engineering and IT.

The four facilities all operate by inspecting materials with small particles - photons or neutrons - using a suite of instruments, often described as super-microscopes. Further facilities are available to researchers in other European countries including the The Léon Brillouin Laboratory (LLB) and the Synchrotron SOLEIL in France, the ALBA synchrotron in Spain, the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin Elektronenspeicherring and the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY in Germany, Paul Scherrer Institut in Switzerland, and the Elettra Synchrotron Light Source in Italy. Each facility provides particle beams with different properties, detected by suites of instruments with different services, to support their national researchers, and the wider international community.

These facilities have joined to collaborate together in the PaNdata consortium to develop a common computing infrastructure to ease the mobility of European scientists between facilities. But do scientists really use more than one facility, or do they just use their local facility, or only use the one they know well?

To answer this question PaNdata have collected encrypted lists of the users of each facility, and counted those who use multiple facilities. Data were collected for 35,968 users of facilities in total; 28,073 used photon sources, while 10, 324 used neutron sources. Although 21.8% used only neutrons, and 71.2% used only photons, 6.7% used both photons and neutrons. Remarkably, all facilities have users in common with all other facilities, also across neutron and photon sources. The results are shown in the table above.

21.6% of users use more than one facility, with 17.2% of photon users using more than one photon source, while 19.2% of neutron users use more than one neutron source - showing that international mobility between European facilities is a real issue. The details in the data reveal far more about the usage patterns of researchers, which will be used to guide the creation of the common European e-infrastructure for these facilities.

Contact

• Dr Juan Bicarregui