 So I want to walk you briefly through some basic considerations when you want to write a beam time proposal, which is also the exercise of this week. Some basic considerations before you actually start. But look, obviously, at all the different neutron sources that you have seen through here. And here are some by now maybe outdated lists again. And I mean, firstly, make yourself clear what you want to do and why. Just like the question that came up now, like what is actually the driver for that? Just be clear about that. And check if neutrons are the method of choice. Actually, that also just came up in this question. Why you need neutrons and not x-rays? Because you could detect the hydrogen inside of metals and discuss your idea with others, either your superwisor or other colleagues. And they bounce back and forth ideas and then fine tune your idea for an experiment. And then check again, this was a very good question, actually. Check if this is feasible, because if you have this very good idea, but maybe your sample environment will destroy this very good idea. And estimate how big can the sample size be? So do some rough estimates of how much the sample or the sample environment will attenuate your beam and see what contrast variations you will have with different neutrons called or thermal or for different isotopes. And there are some references that we'll show after this. So this is just to have you as a reference, I will upload these slides after the lecture. There are some useful references to estimate the attenuation of materials. Many of this you will have seen. And this NIST website is useful. Then you can see the different scattering contributions. This is actually based on this paper that is uploaded there by CS, where you can see the different scattering contributions. And here's a link to the different calculators that you can use, different cross-section calculators. And there's a nice database called X4 and also Yanis Books. So maybe just try to open these up there bit awkward to use, I would say, but you need to enter the right energy range you're interested in because these databases cover a much bigger range that we are interested in because they're also used for other nuclear applications, these cross-sections. And be careful when you look at this type of data, there are usually many data sets in measured different facilities. And there might already be some, I mean, maybe not necessarily wrong, but some dubious data sets in there as well. So just the warning, but play around with both these links, that's quite useful. And then decide if you want to do radiography and need a time series, or do you actually need tomography or can you design your experiment that it does work in radiography? Also like this question that just came up, if you want to study hydrogen or hydrogen and aluminum and metals, can you actually solve the relevant question if you just do radiography? I guess what's also there is if you want to, if you do want to do tomography, you have to be 3D and you have to fast, then there's really only one place you can do very fast tomography now, I guess, which is the ILL. But if you don't need to do such fast 3D tomography and then it relaxes your constraint on where you go, that's always worth considering. Yeah, that's a very good point. That's always like you need to kind of in this, tune it all together where your requirements and needs are. And do you actually need wavelength resolution or can it be just white beam? And if you need wavelength resolution would time of flight work for you, but then you need to consider the spatial resolution that is maybe available there and is that helpful? And this is the wavelength dependency of the attenuation signal again, that you will also find on these websites. Again, in neutron energy here and you can see this characteristic break edges for iron and aluminum. And yeah, so you should be aware and then depending on the part of the spectrum or what kind of beam line you use you get different contrast for these materials. If you are dealing with crystalline materials these links to X4 and Yarnes that I showed they don't necessarily show really the crystalline structure these break edges. So you're welcome to download this free tool called an XS plotter that shows these break edge spectrum basically and all the different contributions. And you can also contact me there are some more examples that you can load in and it's a small GUI that is easy to use. And you should also consider is it worth like would you benefit from bi-modal neutron and X-ray imaging? And then you should of course pick a beam line that offers this and what is the spatial resolution that you really require? Again, look at the L over D ratios and then finally then write a good proposal and convince the reviewers that they should give you beam time. And that's part of the exercise now. And maybe before I also think if the sample may activate if you know what's in there again these NIST calculators can give you a quick estimate on what activation you can expect. So do you need your sample back and when? Yeah, so that actually this activation one and now we're coming to the proposal itself. There's a simple several administrative things to consider go to the website of the facilities. There's this website, NeutronSources.org. There's also this International Society for Neutron Radiography that I already mentioned. And typically there are two calls per year and the panels also they need two calls per year to evaluate the proposals. And then start early enough if you don't have one already to make a user account and start early enough, especially if you want for example to go to Japan the Japanese websites have some very peculiarities let's say and it's better to go through that process early and often you need some safety checkups need online trainings and a lot of these type of things. And just be aware that typically these imaging beam lines are very much oversubscribed by a factor of two or three. I believe the ILL one was even much more oversubscribed in the last runs. So it will be competitive to get to some of the good facilities maybe apply it more than one facility for instance that works for you. And you should really respect the template from the facility in format and format and length because the reviewers will get annoyed if that's the right format or it may already be rejected on an earlier stage by some other instance if you don't adhere to the format that's given. So maybe it will never even reach a reviewer. So some basics of the proposal it must be scientifically compelling and competitive. So you should know what could be done should be done and it must be done and what will be like the highlights what is the scientific case you will tackle and would actually neutron imaging give you a result that would really allow to advance your scientific field. And it should be a very targeted proposal don't be too vague. It should come out what you wanna do and why and if you have preliminary measurements or characterization it can be this neutrons but doesn't have to be especially if you wanna do neutron imaging will be very good maybe sometimes even the prerequisite to already show that you have done X-ray imaging or X-ray tomography and have a full portfolio of why you need access to this beam line. And as I already said, typically there are lots of proposals, many proposals to review and reviewers then typically don't have the time to go through extra information that are given in references and avoid typos as your major may just end up as a wrong pile of proposals if it's very competitive. Even if you have a very good proposal you should also really try to write it well. And the structure should be important that it's easy to follow and actually make sense that there's not an unknown technical risk that your experiment may fail and then another experiment may be favored. And very important this came out already yesterday consigned the beam line stuff before and the four of us can play the role of the beam line stuff if you have some questions now in this exercise. Target the measurements based on the beam line what setup is needed and identify how the experiment can be done there and so on so discusses. And early enough has under indicated he's typically swamped this request when the proposal deadline is nearing. So if you have an idea just even months before you can already reach out to the beam line scientists. And you should also get advice on how many days you should request that you have a reasonable request in there. And nicely if you can present it in some table format I need this many days for this certain task. The proposal itself it should have a very strong summary a clear statement and the reviewer should be able to understand what the proposal is about and this details and given in the following section then typically follow some scientific background set the scene to your research topic maybe the reviewers most likely are not experts in your scientific field it should be easy enough to understand what you're doing and maybe trigger also their interest and indicate some fundamentals scientific and societal importance of your work as well is truly helpful. So not too different from like a research paper. And describe any hypothesis that you may want to confirm with your experiment and again important which information that the experiment provides that can only be easily obtained by using neutrons. So this is an underlying scheme of your proposal that you really make clear like any neutrons and not x-rays for this. There's an awful lot of proposals where it's where maybe the reviewer doesn't know would it work with x-rays? Maybe to you it's very obvious that you need neutrons but then maybe just write it out in the sentence why x-rays don't work. Even if it's crystal clear to you it's better to write it. And if you can find enough space space is of course a challenge in any proposal but it can be very useful to have a figure as it can replace many words and also show maybe your previous work that you have done. Then the last nearly the last parts of the proposal are the experimental details. How will you carry out the experiment and details of and the quantity of the samples is very important. Typically there are some special fields in the proposal templates to enter this but at the end I believe personally it's good to have like a table at the end of the proposal to highlight what samples you have, what technique will you use and any special requirements and just really make sure that you are appearing prepared and that not everything is just a rough idea that it's not really sought through. So if you can underline that you can surely have already the samples prepared or will prepare them that's useful and make sure the technical feasibility is in place that this is actually technical feasible. If there's some doubt and will be brought up in the review panel that it may not that you haven't contacted the beamline scientist and there's doubt about the feasibility that's not a good sign and you would be asked to contact the beamline scientist and then apply again in the next round. And what are the beamline beam time requirements? You should support the choice of this particular beamline and as I already said, if you can show to calculate, give a rough estimate on why if you regret three days why do you need three days? I need half a day for setup and first overnight to do this type of measurement and then another one. And this can be relatively short. So the results and expected significance should be highlighted as well. It's not continuing. What are you expecting? Come back a little bit to the summary and close the loop to the end. And at the end, give some references, maybe some important milestones, papers in your field or end or papers that you have published in this field. So it's showing that you have already experienced and this end can publish on that matter. So don't expect however, the review is actually to open and read these proposals. So be a bit clever how you put the citation in there. This is now actually going not to the proposal itself, but when you are, want to do the experiment and what kind of preparations you should do there, you can envision if you have, as you've seen in the video fly out to Japan to do the test, there's many preparations that you should, you can refer back to this presentation.