 I'm grateful for him. Welcome for him. He is over at the ESS Council meeting. We thought we would take the opportunity to attend to give a seminar here. For an I go back a long way, in fact a very long way, so I'm very grateful for him to give a chance to sit back on the time that we've been working together in different ways, he came from Edinbro. We did physics in Edinburgh, I think, and then you came to Peel, your PhD, where you joined the... What I think was a still thing, was remarkable by a physics group that we had out there. And that was... We did some amazing things, lot of amazing things, and it was a great little group, which I shall remember very fondly, and not least the Wednesday evening, because that was what we used to over-indulge in the pub in the evening, which was this very memorable event, some of them. But as I remember it, you then moved eventually from Keel to ILL, where you worked on the D-19 de facto-metre, which I also later started working on as well, which is an amazing experience, an amazing instrument, in fact. And then after that, I think you went to Los Alamos, to the Lamp's source, and worked with Ben Oshunborn on developing... It was called the Protein Chrysloffi instrument there. And I'm trying to... I'm testing my memory now, but I think then, after quite a while there, you moved to Cochryglab as a senior scientist, and subsequently became associate director there. And after quite a long time there, you then moved to ILL as the director general of the UK and director at ILL, where you are now. So it's a great pleasure to have you here to talk about what you've been doing at ILL and what the next stage of biological development is going to be and the science that's coming out of it. So thank you for coming along, and you have displayed good quality at all. Thank you, Trevor, for those kind words of introduction. And good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for coming along to this seminar. And Trevor, thanks for inviting me to... You know, I really like the links concept. I know that there's huge opportunity developing links. And as we continue to grow a programme of neutron and x-ray scattering in Europe. So it's exciting to be here. And as Trevor said, my name is Paul Langan, and director of the Institute of the Rolive Launched Fund, or the ILL, as we see. And the ILL is a leading centre for neutron science and technology located in Grenoble right here. This is the reactor here. And we produce intense beams of neutrons so that visiting researchers can come and do neutron scattering studies of the materials that they're interested in. So researchers from across Europe and across the world visit us in order to gain a more fundamental understanding of their materials, the structure and dynamics of their materials. And not only do they want to make new scientific discoveries, but they also want to improve the materials in order to enable new technologies. And the ILL is co-located with the European Synchron Radiation Facility, a world-reading photon source. And between the ILL and the ESA, and there's the Grenoble European Molecular Biology Lab, EMBL, and also the Structural Biology Institute, the EBS. So on this campus, and we call it the European Photron and Neutron campus, there really is co-located in the same place within walking distance. Some of the most powerful experimental capabilities that users can have access to that use beams of electrons, photons and neutrons. It's a really exciting place to do science. And furthermore, around this scientific research anchor, and several tech companies have co-located in order to exploit and leverage our facilities. So there's a kind of ecosystem for innovation that's been developed in Grenoble over the past 10, 20 years. And I think the reason I'm talking about that is because I see similar, really similar opportunities in Lund to develop the same type of innovation ecosystem. I think there are three ingredients to have a successful dynamic innovation ecosystem. One is world-reading experimental capabilities. And you have them at Max4. You will have them at the ESS. The second is a brilliant top-class university in Grenoble. We have the UCR, the University Grenoble Arts. And Lund, you have, in the surrounding region, you have really top-class universities. And the third key ingredient is a metropolis or a city or a local authority that invests in the infrastructure to facilitate interactions between university, experimental facilities, and new tech companies. And you have that as well. So exciting time in Lund. Every day, about 30,000 researchers come to this innovation ecosystem site, and the crest heels between the Drag River and the Ease Air, and to develop new, to do research that enables new technologies. And so, I just want to say a few very basic words about why new terms are unfortunately in the context of materials research. You know, material scientists use a variety of different techniques to better understand materials. And many of those techniques are based on the use of beams of electrons, x-rays, or neutrons. And each of these techniques sees materials in a different way. For examples, for example, electrons interact through, with materials, through the current potential of atoms. You know, so it's an electrostatic interaction. It's incredibly strong. And because of the strength, and electrons have very limited penetration, it sees things incredibly easily. And it can also cause radiation damage. And photons interact with the atomic electron cloud of atoms through the electromagnetic interaction. They can be highly penetrating if they're small wavelength hard entries. And they're very powerful for locating atoms and their dynamics. They're scattered in proportion to the atomic number of an atom. So the more electrons an atom has, the easier it is to be seen by photons. The fewer electrons an atom has, the more difficult it is. So one of the limitations of using photons or entries is that light elements like hydrogen and lithium are almost invisible to photons. And neutrons are neutral. You have no residual charge. And so they're highly penetrating. They interact directly with the nuclei of atoms through the strong nuclear force. So they don't depend on atomic number. And, you know, light atoms like hydrogen, lithium, and sodium are easily seen with neutrons. And we can also differentiate between isotopes such as hydrogen and titanium. And a disadvantage of neutrons is, although they interact through the strong force, their interactions are actually kind of weak compared to electromagnetic and electrostatic interactions. And another thing is that you have spin or magnetic moments. So neutrons are like little magnets and they interact strongly with magnetism, deep within materials, both, you know, and magnetism associated with the electron, electron, biotime and nuclear magnetism. And also they have energies that are really well matched to atomic and molecular vibrations in materials. So they can be used in an elastic way to determine dynamics. And you have wavelengths that can be tuned from between a fraction of an angstrom all the way to 90 meters. So we've got an incredibly wide range of wavelengths that allows neutrons to be cured to looking at very small atomic resolution structures of a huge bit beyond complex molecular structures. So the important thing is that neutrons have a combination of unique properties, which makes them useful in combination of axes and photons. All of these techniques are incredibly important in a complementary way. And increasingly researchers use combinations of neutrons, axes and electrons to get a complete picture of a complex system with orthogonal information from the different chains. And there's one other property for neutrons that is important and some applications in particular in particle physics and that is gravity. And so researchers use the IOL to conduct time impact science in many areas. For example, and we use neutron scattering emission radiation. We use neutrons in particle physics to make new scientific discoveries. This example here is some work we're doing and we've been doing for some time to try and detect and other dimensions or extensions of our universe, which are required in some of the extensions of the standard model in particle physics. And we use the fact that neutrons have magnetic properties to explore new states of physics like topological materials, quantum spin liquids, to better understand them so that they'll have new materials and technologies that could reach to the next generation of computers and communications. And we provide over 40 beam lines tuned to different types of measurements and different types of science. And we're actually coming to the end of a long decade of improving our instruments and within the next year and a half, we'll have a suite of instruments with unprecedented capabilities for doing new science. And we actually start there, start talk, the reactor after the long shutdown early next year, with some new instruments and instruments that have been improved to have new capabilities. So we're very excited about the new science that we're going to start doing next year with our previous instruments. So I'm actually not going to talk about the facility itself. And I'm not going to talk about individual applications of neutrons to particle physics or our condensed matter physics. Rather, I want to emphasise the benefits of being co-located on the European Potion and Neutron campus by giving you some science examples that have come from partnerships or use of neutrons, entries and electrons. Okay, so I'll have a few examples. There are just my favorite examples at the moment. There are recent examples on this real life. So the first thing, the first partnership that we have in Grenovo is one that Trevor was involved in Centre Rock. And it's a partnership between the EMBL, ESRF, ILL and IDS, the Structural Biology Institute in the ILL, to develop common platforms and common access modes for structural biology. So this partnership actually enables and operates and makes available about 20 different experimental platforms. And for visiting researchers, those platforms include enable access to neutron and crystallography for looking at enzymes and drug targets and cryoEM for looking at a single particle reconstruction of complex materials at the nanometre level. And also X-ray crystallography for really complex systems, including this potassium membrane channel. And also cryo and tomography, or TE, and trying tomography for looking at huge structures like this and a cumulative sanctuary that was expressed in that equal life. And almost at the scale of a micron, just under a micron. So an incredible incentive in different platforms that enable looking at biology all the way from the atomic scale almost to the micro-scale. And I'm going to give you one example in the area of biology and using neutron crystallography, which is like biodegraded from fortress muscle mass and NIH and involves ILL and collaboration through the partnership for structural biology. So as you all know, the coronavirus and SARS-CoV-2 is quite a simple structure. It consists of our membrane and spike proteins that interact with yeast receptors and tube and hostels, and then through the category of protein versus genetic information, in addition to some envelope proteins and membrane proteins. There are also a set of associated helper proteins, in particular the main proteins. And in this project it's led by Oak Ridge University and the members of the team wanted to design drugs and are inhibitors against the coronavirus. So when the virus attacks a host cell, the spike protein of the virus binds to the yeast receptor and then the spike protein goes through a confirmation change. There's a succinocode S2 that unfolds a bit and that breaks at one point and it displays some fusion proteins in F1 to F4 in particular. They interact with the membrane and disrupt the membrane and allow the viral membrane to fuse with the host membrane and then the genetic information that the protein is released into the host cell. And once the genetic information is in the host cell and there's the host cell's own replication and transcription machinery expresses a long polypeptide, a viral polypeptide, and then that viral polypeptide gets chopped up into functional units by the main proteins. So the main proteins from the virus is a really key enzyme in ensuring that the virus can go to develop to maturity and then can impact other cells. So this team wanted to develop inhibitors or drugs that bind to the main proteins to stop it during its job to prevent viral infection. They wanted to use neutrons rather than traditional x-rays because when an inhibitor binds to its target it does so through hydrogen bonds and electrostatic interactions that are determined by the protonation state of residues in the binding site. So seeing hydrogen is really important for drug binding. When you use photons to determine the structure of a protein what you see is essentially the structural skeleton of the protein but in order to see hydrogen and you need to look deeper with neutrons. So this team collected a large number of neutron structures of the main proteins with different drugs bound using an instrument called the Ladi at the IOL and we've actually just built a second instrument, a second end station called Ladi. So now we have two end stations that enable protein crystallography and drug design. So they collected data from various and they selected a bunch of different existing inhibitors against diseases that attack and against inhibitors that attack different proteins for herpes and AIDS. You look at the structure of these existing inhibitors bound to the proteins and the proteins, it's actually a diameter and these two energies are just really the representation of the same thing but one is a surface representation and the other one is a skeletal representation. But from the information we've got from the neutron studies of the different existing inhibitor bound to the binding site, the rationally designed new inhibitors, you know, taking different features from existing drugs and building up a number of new drugs that might be more effective than bound and more strongly. And this is one of the inhibitors that the rationally designed you can see that it has a beautiful pattern of very strong hydrogen bonds between the inhibitor here in the binding pocket and formed by neutron studies. And they actually found that most of their inhibitors did have antivital activity, you know, in vivo ACEs, but one of them inhibitors performed almost just as well as the Pfizer auto inhibitor that was developed by a year after the COVID-19 pandemic started. So it's a really successful example of using neutrons to do thin rational drug design. Having said that, I think the coolest thing from this study is the following. And so this is the binding site of the main proteins with different drugs, different structures overweight. And, you know, so, and there are structures determined with different inhibitors, including the Pfizer drug. And when I look at this, it reminds me that what we find was that as different inhibitors come into the binding site, they actually push the binding site around, is malleable or plastic, and they squeeze in by distorting this around in protein. And so it's not like a rigid binding site and a rigid inhibitor that comes into, you know, a look in the case of neculism. The inhibitors actually push things about and squeeze in to form tank bonds. And the other thing which I think is even more important is when you look at the binding site, the electrostatic pattern in the binding site changes after the inhibitor binds. In other words, the inhibitors induce changes in proteination in the binding site to establish an electrostatic pattern that fits it. And that kind of induced proteination, I think, is something that clearly you have done with this hand. I think it's a really cool discovery. And so great work. And so another partnership that we have on the campus is a partnership for salt content matter. And they were also active during the pandemic and trying to understand how the virus gets access to both cells. And they did some really nice work where they looked at the spike protein interaction with the cell membrane and seeing that the spike proteins actually pull out individual phosphor lipids in a way that weakens the cell membrane. And a little bit later on, they also looked at how the spike protein fusion peptides actually gain access and disrupt the membrane so that the genetic material can be injected into the first cell. And we'll talk about that a little bit. So, as I said, when the spike protein binds to the ACE receptor and there's a subunit S2, which kind of changes complication and unfolds and makes it available for fusion peptides in particular. And they looked at using a technique called reflectometry, which involves reflecting neutrons of a flat surface, a membrane surface. They looked at how the four different fusion peptides Fp1 to Fp4 interact with the membrane. And what they found out was that one fusion peptide, in particular Fp4, and I see that Fp4 or Fp4, but one peptide, in particular, binds into the membrane and goes a little bit in when there's very little calcium present. When you increase calcium levels, the peptide goes all the way across the membrane. And when you reduce calcium levels again, it kind of pulls back out again. And there was another fusion peptide, in particular, and it's either Fp1 or Fp4 or Fp2. And I can't remember which is which, but there's another one, which binds across the possible lipids and hand groups. It doesn't insert it just sits on the membrane really strongly. And from that information, they were able to develop a model which explains how the virus could actually insert its genetic material into the first cell. And so, this is a schematic picture that shows the S2 subunit, the spike protein, and then this 4-volve, Fp4, and then this is Fp1. I could have explained that. Anyway, this is the one which binds really strongly to the and the possible lipid hand groups. And this is the one that it sucks itself in. So, inside our cells in our body, there are actually quite high calcium levels which promote Fp1 and suck itself into the membrane. And here you see that other fusion protein flat on the membrane, sticking to the membrane and pulling the virus inwards. But as soon as the our host cell membrane gets exposed, the scientific class of the scientific host cell is actually really low in calcium, so it causes the Fp4 and can't try to pull out and give access of the virus to the host cell. That's a kind of cool result from using reflectometry and to provide us with information about how the virus can be exposed. Facilitated by our partnership with structural condensed matter. Right, something totally different. But again, some work based on local partnerships. And we have a battery hub in Grenovo, which has partners, including ESF, ILL, CVV, and that's the centre for atomic, the commission for the centre for atomic energy or alternative energy. And the battery hub and our researchers look at a variety of different types of battery technologies and materials for different technologies, including lithium batteries. Sodium batteries, different types of electrodes on electrolytes and membranes, etc. But one technology that's gaining a lot of interest is batteries that are based on solid sodium electrolytes, batteries within which everything's solid and it's based on sodium conduction. There are already sodium batteries that are operational. This one produced by CNRS in the Soviet environment is, in fact, not a solid electrolyte and battery. I think it's a liquid electrolyte. But I just want to point out that sodium batteries are making progress and they are being used. And this is from CNRS and a number of different collaborators were interested in exploring ion conduction in a particular promising sodium electrolyte code and sodium biophosphate. And it has a known, it's polymorphic, it can go through different crystal phases as a function of temperature or pressure. And in this x-ray experiment, they looked at the changes in a crystal structure. And, you know, this is Q and these are ragged reflections as a function of temperature. And what they saw was that there is an alpha phase that's stable on control by 250 centigrade. And then there's a slow second order transition to a beta phase. And then finally, right at the top, at about 500 Celsius, there is a very abrupt first order transition to a phase in which it's still crystalline, but it has better way to a longer charger. And this is the unit cell volume as a function of temperature. And you can see the slow second order transition between alpha and beta. And then the very abrupt first order transition to the gamma, that high temperature gamma phase. And the fact that that's second order and that's first order has been confirmed, you know, with them and keep on general measurements. So they determined the crystal structure in the alpha and the beta phase. And what we find out was that it's tetragonal at room temperature. And green are the sodium ions. There are two different positions represented by different shades of green. Yellow, sulfur, and blue is phosphate. So you have these thiophosphate tetrachydrons and then sodium ions in between. And when we go from the tetragonal alpha phase to the cubic beta phase, and the sodium ions change positions on the c-axis, and the tetrahedra reorient a little bit, so we go, so the symmetry becomes simple, we get cubic phase. That seems pretty straightforward. But then it collected some total staching. And total staching is a bit like the fraction that you measure everything and you use all of the information to generate pure distribution functions and through your transform. And it did actually a neutron total staching. This is a pure distribution function from one of the extra measurements. And these peaks represent interatomic distances. And what we find was the interatomic distances of atoms and the tetrahedra did not change across the whole transition from alpha, beta, to gamma. And furthermore, going from alpha to beta, the distances between and those tetrahedra and the sodium atoms didn't really change at all also. And so from this, they believe that the beta phase isn't really cubic. It has an average cubic structure. But, and what's really happening is that there's a dynamic disorder, a real dynamic disorder, and also a spatial statistical disorder of the tetrahedral units that produces, on average, a cubic structure. And actually, I saw this initially, it reminded me of ice seven. I don't know if you know of ice, but there's one particular phase called ice seven, which has a very simple structure. It's the disorder of the water molecules inside of the disorder. And the bond lines don't make sense in this simple, high resolution disorder structure. The bond lines in ice seven are all too small. But when you look at pure distribution functions, you see that the waters actually aren't distorted. They're real waters. It's just you see a statistically average structure that distorts things. So I think that that was kind of cool. And what we actually have is this structure surviving into the beta phase disorder. And furthermore, when you go into the high temperature structure, about 500, all of the peaks associated with sodium disappear. So you effectively go aflood at a liquid-like sodium structure. The diamphosphate tetrahedrons, they're still there. And so they're tetrahedrons based on a cubic structure with a fluid of a liquid of sodium in between, which is very interesting. And that's confirmed with an elastic neutron density of states measurements, which show that about 500, there are no local vibrations in sodium. It's just fluid. So this study showed that the beta phase, although it's cubic on average, has taken track in a local structure of dynamic and static disorder. Gamma phase is maize of basic. There's a complete change. But the interesting thing is that at these subpar and phosphor positions, the huge opportunity tax we do for change and other elements, and that's already started to be explored. And this is the high, this is the base, the beta phase was highest conductivity. So the exciting thing is the potential to do this, to change the temperature at which you get transition from alpha to beta. I thought it was quite interesting. Neutrons were absolutely essential. And because neutrons provided not only pure distribution information, but also the density of states, vibrational information to interpret, to help interpret the data that was collected using Neutrons. Oh, right. So I'm not going to say much about this. I just wanted to show you this brief example because we have two imaging stations at the ILO and we're building a third one. It's actually another end station for this Neutron imaging station called NEXT. And we can collect both X-ray and Neutron data at the same time. So we can do Neutron and X-ray tomographic imaging with really good time resolution on complex engineering components. And this is the Neutron detector. That's the X-ray detector. A spatial resolution here is pretty good for imaging. It can be down to five microns. And this, the time resolution can also be pretty good. It can be down to a second. So it's interesting. And this is simple. And we use it for a variety of different studies, including looking at, you know, fuel cells and batteries, that type of thing, you know, looking at migration. But in this case, here we've got concrete drying and our concrete under heat, which is important for a number of reasons. The structural integrity of concrete, but also, and I didn't notice until I spoke to the instrument scientists, but currently, when a building catches fire, you know, the concrete heats up. And if there's any water that's trapped within the concrete in a way that doesn't have a path outwards, there can be a huge buildup of steam that catastrophically releases at some stage and concrete fails and then the building collapses. So understanding how, you know, the mechanism for concrete drying and what happens during heating is really important. But anyway, in this example, we collected extra ton of aggregate data to look at the developmental visions or visions in the concrete and use neutrons to look at how that moisture traveled within the concrete as it was being dried. So neutrons can show distinguish between the grains and different parts of the cement of different and moisture contents or actually find that much more difficult, but actually, so really good for looking at visions or futures in concrete. Oh, okay, good. So this is another kind of data for a huge amount of collaboration on campus. And, you know, it's focused on high and extreme dimensions or just membranes in general. There are many, many new technologies that have been developed today that involve using polymeric exchange or electrolyte membranes, including pure cells and electrolyzers that generate hydrogen from water. You know, pumping in photons to produce electrons that convert water into hydrogen. And this approach is quite well developed when it comes to pure cells that transport hydrogen or protons across the membrane. So, you know, hydrogen comes in in these re-interacts with that catalyst like platinum and protons are transported across a polymeric electrolyte membrane to a cathode and your water is the result. So here we have platinum fuel producing electricity with a risk of water. So it's a pretty clean way of generating electricity. The problem is that the catalysts used are quite difficult to combine, quite expensive. And looking at the alternative of creating hydroxide aligns and transporting them across is attractive because it doesn't require such extreme and noble mental catalysts. So this team from UC and led by UC London have been looking at cells and align electrolyte membranes and the cheapened urine and water. The catalysis produces hydroxide ions that flow across the membrane and interact with incoming hydrogen to produce water. So again, it's pretty clean and it's more favourable than proton and transport membranes, just because it uses catalysts and waste damage and services. So better what was known by the mechanism of hydroxide transport across the membrane and it's been studied before using neutrons and the thought is that transport is largely determined by bulk water and in the states you would see the heat cure of transport where the hydrogen just gets carried along with the bulk of water. And also pumpkin and my hot hydroxide ion pops from side to side, either through the proton transport or the hydroxide ion popping from side to side. And then of course there's the dynamics of the polymer background itself. The membranes in this case are made from hydrophobic backgrounds with ionic sidechains. So these are hydrophobic backgrounds with nucleotide synthesis and cationic sidechain. Okay, good. So the team in this case used a range of different neutrons spectrometers, three different neutrons spectrometers. They covered different time scales. The time scales that they thought would be involved in the dynamics of hydroxide ion and transport across the membrane. So all the way from a fraction of a second to nanoseconds. And they did something that was really clever. So the use of technique called back scattering, neutron back scattering, which involves measuring inelastic scattering from hydrogen. And so by measuring inelastic scattering from hydrogen, you can determine the dynamics of molecules that have hydrogen involved. And in this case, the first of all, we've checked a normal sample with water, hydroxide ions, and the follow back background and side group. And they were able to see the dynamics of everything, all of the hydrogen action to the system. So hydrogen are the lethal groups of the polymer, water and hydroxide. It's very complicated. Everything is piled up on top of each other. And so they substituted the OH and used to go with the titanium. So they removed the water and hydroxide group and saw only the dynamics from the polymer and back one and side chain. So they could focus on a polymer. And then they removed the hydroxide group and the crystal with bromine or bromide. And so they removed the hydroxide group from the scattering data. So they were able to separate each component of the membrane in order to get the dynamics of each of these different components to a group. And it's not been seen, that popping has not been seen, it's getting actually used in your terms. So I'm not going to go into detail here, but the collected elastic data first and they saw the elastic intensity of the data changing. And as we went from, so with Max-Country experiments, you usually freeze your sample and then you bring it up in temperature and actually increase the temperature. Different motions start at different times. So they increased the temperature and then we saw the elastic scattering decreasing because of rotations of lethal groups on the polymer back one. And then after a different regime, they saw a significant drop in intensity due to the side chains of the polymer starting to revive. And then another change as well water started to revive. And then finally, they actually saw hydroxide high temperature for the first time. And I'm not going to go through this, but I want to point out that it was a really nice experiment because at the talk, they were able to focus in on the polymer dynamics by replacing water and hydroxyl ions by the deuterium counterparts in some of the dynamics here. They were able to use a very high resolution instrument at the IRL called ion 16 in order to confirm the presence of hydroxyl ion popping for proton movement. And then they changed the water content of their cell during the experiment to get the water dynamics of the bulk water. A really complex story, the key message is they were able to confirm the reductions in conductivity of those cells. And it's been thought in the past that hydroxyl ions did chemically degrade the membranes, that they were able to show that reductions in productivity are really associated with a reduction in dynamics, not chemical degradation of membranes. But they were able to show that at very low levels of population, popping dominates. And actually increase the water uptake and bulk water dynamics and take over and be hit your own transport takes over. In other words, hydroxyl ions being carried along with groups of water hydrating them. Anyway, the real reason I want to show you this example is not because of the science, because it says this is in time when, this is in time when, because it's a sanctuary to my next example. And this is my last example and my favorite one. And it's about untangering, not disentangering, untangering the threats of cellulose maximisation. So, very quickly, cellulose is a material that's produced in plants and bacteria. And in plants, there's a membrane-bound complex, cellulose synthesis complex that takes glucose units and joins them up into linear cellulose polymers. And those polymers are excluded out into the cell wall of a plant or the caterpillar of a bacterium. And all of the polymers are pointing in the same direction, the parallel, the hydrogen bonded to sheets and then these sheets packed together through hydropobic forces, and they make nanofibers that have really high tensile strength. They're nanofibers, high tensile nanofibers, with the cellulose chains of polymers all pointing in the same direction. I'm actually determined the structure using small angle neutron scattering and deuteration. By using small angle neutron scattering and deuteration, we were able to visualise different components of this complex. And if it's a plant cell wall, these high tensile strength nanofibers, they bundle up together into macro fibers. They're bundles of fibers and then these cellulose bundles and also associated with other polymers like lichlin and camey cellulose. They're like kind of rebar in concrete. They provide structural strength to plant cell walls. And you know these bundles consist of nanocrystals in which all the fibers are parallel, but the nanocrystals can be anti-parallel. So within the nanocrystals everything is parallel, but nanocrystals themselves can be up or down. And we determined this structure using again small angle neutron scattering. We actually determined this plant structure to understand how plant biomass can be treated during biofuels production. And we also determined the crystal structure within each of the nanofibers. Again using neutrons because neutrons can see hydrogen and these nanofibers or crystals are held together through hydrogen bonding. So hydrogen is the key. And this is a cellulose chain. You can see it's got a directionality. You know this end is different from this end because here there's a ring-oxygen, here there's a hydroxygen third trick. Here's a hydrogen atom forming an entrogene hydrogen bond. Here's a hydrogen atom forming an entrogene hydrogen bond. The key thing is that all the chains are pointing in the same direction. And this is cellulose and strong plant matter. Once it's been dipped into sodium and weak solutions of sodium hydroxide, it goes through a complete morphological change and comes out as a beautiful textile. And this process was actually identified back in the 1800s by an English chemist called Mercer, John Mercer. And the process is called Mercerisation. And it's still used today widely in the textile industry to take naturally occurring cellulose and transform it into a shiny, hard, diverse sector, enhanced material. Mercerised cellulose. So rheon and viscose for trans, these are all Mercerised cellulose products. And we also looked at the crystal structure of cellulose and Mercerised cellulose. And for some time it's been known that rather than the chains all having the same parallel direction, every second chain has actually changed direction. And so the crystal structure is anti-parallel. And that always perplexed me. How can you have a nano rod that's thousands of monomers long and treat it with a little bit of sodium hydroxide and then get that crystal structure for the chains of the anti-parallel? I just find that really interesting. How can that happen? And actually two people have come up with different proposed mechanisms. So if you've got two nano crystals sitting next to each other and one's pointing down and one's pointing up, perhaps when you treat with sodium hydroxide the two neighboring nano crystals can swap chains or merge together so that you get parallel chains. That mechanism is proposed by John Blackwell and his colleague Colpac back in the 1970s and 80s. And another possibility is that rather than the chains from different nano crystals mixing and perhaps within each nano crystal the chains can fold back on each other. So you kind of get a zigzag catch of chains. And that mechanism is proposed by someone from Grenovo and your collaborate with called Henri Chancy. So these are two possible explanations for what happens here. And we actually thought of an experiment to test which one is correct. Just so that we know which is correct, there's no reason why we did this experiment other than in curiosity. So we worked like that if we could generate a sample within which we have nano crystals within which the cellulose is all generated based hydrogen by deuterium and make sure our hydrogenated cellulose scattering from the blue generated crystals will be very different from the scattering from the hydrogenated crystals. And the calculated scattering from that unit cell and those two units will be very different. So if we can only get a sample per half of the nano fibers are fully deuterated and half of them are hydrogenous and we can marginalize that sample and then we should be able to tell which proposed mechanism is correct. So we spent years, literally years, growing cellulose from a certain type of bacterium that produces a pelleture of cellulose and adapting that bacterium to grow in deuterated media so that pelleture is completely deuterated. So we have nano crystals and a pelleture that's been grown on completely deuterated media. So the nano crystals are deuterated and it took us years to find a way to free up those nano crystals and then orient them into fibers for fiber diffraction. So we made pelletures of deuterated and hydrogenous cellulose. We oriented them and we took, so we had samples like that, half, you know, 50% deuterated, 50% hydrogenous and we marginalized it and we collected nuclear data. And so this is fiber diffraction data collected using x-rays from cell, from marginalized cellulose. Faction data collected from a sample with all deuterated cellulose, a sample with all hydrogenated cellulose and a sample where we had equal mixtures of nano crystals which were deuterated and hydrogenous. We measured the intensities and it was clear that this is the mechanism which actually happens within cellulose and I should oxidise it. That's really cool. I answered the question and that's a huge simplification. You know it's probable that the cellulose broke back on each other, you know, on itself many times and I have no idea what the use of this insight is but I just really wanted to know but I didn't notice that it's been seen in polymers and some polymers under certain conditions, you can have regions in which they can go back on each other. It's called a shoot back arrangement and interestingly the mechanical properties of polymers that have this shoot back arrangement are really interesting because if you stretch them, you can actually get lined polymers and if you do stretch them, the mechanical properties are completely different. So maybe there could be some future and use of this experiment but for me it was just the scientific interest of solving the problem. So I just wanted to say that, you know, we're starting the use of program next year. We're incredibly excited about having a new suite of updated instruments with new experimental capabilities. We're going to operate for 160 days a year, three reactor cycles, everyone can apply for a new time and we're really excited about the code guys we've made over the past year in a big shutdown during which we improved the safety, security and sustainability of our reactor. It's like a new reactor now and we've been strongly working away with the community to prepare for the restart. These are some stuff from Trevor's old group and life sciences who have been working with the user community to generate things and were ready for the use of program to start. That's it, thanks very much. Thank you, thank you very much for a beautiful talk. It's been amazing to see all of those things and also we're excited to see that it's all coming back. I forgot to mention Trevor, you were involved in that last example. Oh, that's interesting. I mean, it was some of the data is ages off. I think it took a long time to put it off. It took very four years to do it. It's amazing that it's come out like that, obviously beautifully in major concerts. That's a great result. But anyway, thank you very much. Beautiful results, lots and lots of optimism there and lots of optimism for the future. One of the things I wanted to ask you, I mean, are there any questions from anybody else or my question? I've got one, Trevor. Right, who's that? It's Simon Kimber. I just want to briefly comment on these claims of local symmetry breaking by the PDF techniques, that example you showed. I have to say that I basically disagree with this interpretation because, as in this case, most of these observations are made around second order phase transitions. In the example you showed, you had a tetragonal to cubic phase transition, which was continuous. What we know from the Edinburgh School of Soft Mode Physics is that you've got a dynamic instability with associated atomic displacements, which will look like the low temperature distorted phase. With the PDF method, you're of course measuring the instantaneous atomic correlations, not the time average ones that you see with diffraction, and that's why it looks like you have this local symmetry breaking. Just to say that one of the last things I did not create before, well before we both left, was you can actually use inelastic neutral scattering to do inelastically resolved per attribution functions that show that all these effects go away. It is just soft mode physics from the 1960s. Thanks Simon, and it's good to hear from you. I don't want to, well I should say that I'm representing someone else's work, and I hope I haven't misrepresented what they did in the paper. That's the first thing. It could be that I'm misinterpreting what I read in the paper, but I completely agree that I think there are two things, aren't there? There's dynamic disorder and static disorder, and static disorder can be variations throughout the sample, and I can't comment on which is prevalent in this case, but in the case of I7, are you familiar with I7? Absolutely, yeah, yeah. Well it's your interpretation of that. Without even worrying about real space stuff, there was always riding corrections that had to be made for protons bonded with very asymmetric motions, right? I don't know whether the bond length in I7 recovers to a reasonable value if you use the old buzing and levy riding corrections. I don't know either, but I do know that the bond length that's extracted from the PDF is correct. Sorry, it's what you would expect, but as the bond lengths you extract from the crystallographic structure, you know, based on the average structure, is way too short. And my understanding is that in that particular example, the bond lengths that one sees in the PDF are what you'd expect, and you can refine it using, you should read the paper actually, it's a really nice paper and it may be that I've misinterpreted it, but they did do a refilled refinement using, I can't remember what it's called, it's when you use a box or a rectangle to do a limited refilled refinement, they've got a trigonal structure across the whole of that alpha beta, yeah, a trigonal structure across the whole of that alpha beta, you know, second order phase, you know, transition. But you know more about this than me. So, you know, I defer to your opinion. Okay, any other questions from anybody online or offline? Let's go. Yeah, I have a more general question about the innovation environment. So, what about the computational facilities and expertise, because we need more and more computation to make sense of all these, these nice experiments. So, what about that sort of infrastructure incredible? I think that's less well developed actually. I think that's great to see. And we, I think we excel in working our first experimental capabilities, and the still opportunity to enhance our ability to bring high performance computing to be right. And one of the questions, is anybody else wants to ask anything before I ask my question? One question I want to ask is the sort of, I suppose it's an obvious one, really, everything with the new term business, everything is in a rather sort of critical stage with, you know, the various sources that are listed as there's ILL, there's ISIS, there's UNIC, and ESS, and it's sort of an awkward stage in terms of the facilities coming on by facilities being developed. So, it's an important but difficult stage. And one of the things I'd like to know is, what, when you see all the areas you've talked about, the biggest opportunities to lie, and how would we go about maximising the collaboration between a place like the ILL and the ESS? How should we go about trying to cultivate that development? And I think that's something that really we, at that link, see something that we're interested in and we'd like to see how we can help with that type of process because it seems to me to be an area where we shouldn't be missing that exploitation, even though there's a natural sense of, you know, sources trying to be the best and so on, maybe, how can we actually facilitate working together and bridging these divides? So, there are many parts to that question. So, let me talk from the point here of the ILL first. And we see ourselves at the moment as providing a large fraction of the capacity for individual staffing in Europe. And we do think that we have a world capacity of instruments, and quite pure from a world view, and some of them are very unique. And we see the opportunity for us over the next few years to continue to be involved in producing a large fraction of the science that comes from the application of neutrons. And in particular, we see a window of opportunity over perhaps even the next decade where that's not going to change. You know, if you want to do a neutron scattering and photons and electrons through nobles, a really attractive place to come and do science. And with our new instruments, I think there are new experimental and scientific possibilities. And I kind of like the idea as I went through of applying neutrons to study the destruction and dynamics of new materials that are associated with big problems that we have at the moment. And, you know, I just chose a few recent ones that were interesting, but we were applying neutrons across a whole range of different material science that, you know, has a potential high impact. So, I think that the next few years, and it's great for us to explore to neutrons at the ILL to do the best science possible. I also see the community that we are building this night are continuing to build with Isis and Aberlan to MPSI has been a community who will hugely benefit from the new capabilities that will be delivered by the ESS. And it's good that the community sees that on the horizon. We need the ESS. We need the new capabilities that they will provide and to continue to do new science. So ESS is essential for us. And to try to bring the same real essential for the ESS, you know, ILL access different to PSI. And if we're not down with ESS, we're in a difficult situation, because you know, in the different user community. And we've been talking to the ESS about and we expect that we can work together to make sure that over that second order of transition if you like, and everyone's successful. But I think, and I'm speaking just from my own point of view, I'm not speaking on behalf of ILL or any country. But I do see the ILL is having, because it's reactivated, it's having strengths in such areas that will remain and and huge strengths after the ESS is built. I think there are some experiments that will be better done at the ILL and some that are better done at ESS because of the different needs for exploration and continuous use. So they're highly complementary. And I think an opportunity for links is to make sure that users and you know, ILL and ESS are a world class or world region. And you know, ESS are, so I think the opportunity for links is to bring people together and network across that infrastructure facility to make sure that users have enhanced and easy access to do the best and the best possible. And I think your opportunity is to, and so you know, select a few areas that you're interested in or you think are incredibly unfortunate, you think forward and within a place to be in the community, you know, to a new community and to make sure that they're fully exploited and what's out there for them. That's probably something and it's an incredibly exciting opportunity for women to become a kind of centre for your enabling people to do the best and the best possible. Yeah, so I'm assuming that the ESS and ESS, the big priority really is in the time that it's taken to build it, then that the music community is cultivated and so that when industry does open, then the first being start to be used, that people there are ready. And that may be the areas of interest there might be to do with how you produce your samples or just getting the whole laboratory environment and the programmes available that they're ready to go rather than sort of wait for the thing to get built up and then suddenly realize you've got to do something which is a bit wasted opportunity. If I may add one more thing, you will find that you wouldn't develop platforms based on characterising of particular samples for max forward and you wouldn't need ESS. Many of the examples and presented today were trying to highlight what's possible by using local platforms. But I think that the fact is that the future is for those partnerships not only to be looked at as platforms but also as centres for scientific excellence, local groups of scientists trying to facilitate it, working through the partnerships to do science if you've done anywhere else. Any other questions? Anybody online? Any last questions? One thing that maybe we won't talk about it now but that always fascinates me is the potential, whether it's crystallographic or otherwise, the potential that neutrons have got to look at proteins, redox proteins for example. It's just amazing and I don't, we've done a little bit on it but I don't think it's ever been fully capitalised on because it's just a crystal growth issue and I think because if you think about it you know you're looking at the field of oxidising a juice state and you've got all the sort of proton stuff going on relating to charged transfer and so on and you can see that there are things going on there well below the surface of what you can see with X-rays and I always feel there's a bit of a thing that we're missing there in terms of investing in or somehow prioritising the ability to facilitate crystallisation. I mean the deuterization is there, a lot of people would effort into deuterization is very important but there's an effort there needed for crystal genesis and the light crystal growth which once it's tackled you know substantially you're into a new epoch of stuff but that's a sort of perhaps a lunchtime conversation. Okay any last questions? All right well in that case thank you very much Paul for a wonderful talk and thank you to the audience from online and Joel Square for coming in on us, so thank you very much.