EIROforum Organisations

ILL - Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL)

The Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) is the world's leading research centre for research using neutron beams. Situated in Grenoble, France, the ILL is a service laboratory which operates the most intense neutron source in the world. Its unique advanced instrumentation is used by scientists from the partner countries for fundamental and applied research.

Its suite of 40 high performance instruments is used to probe the structure and dynamics of existing and newly created materials in the finest detail. The ILL neutron scattering facilities provide an indispensable analytical tool for the analysis of the structure of novel conducting and magnetic materials for future electronic devices, the measurement of stresses in mechanical materials, and investigations into how complex molecular assemblies behave, particularly in a biological environment. The ILL also tackles questions relating to the fundamental properties of matter.

An ambitious modernisation programme was launched in 2000, with the aim of an average 10-fold boost in the global performance of the instrument suite, through the design of new neutron infrastructure and the introduction of new instruments and instrument upgrades. The first phase has already resulted in 17-fold gains in performance. The second phase is underway with the building of 5 new instruments, the upgrade of 4 others, and the installation of 3 new neutron guides.

The ILL has three founding partners, France, Germany and the United Kingdom, and ten scientific partners, Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

About 1 500 guest scientists use these facilities each year to carry out more than 850 experiments, carefully selected for their scientific merit by international peer-review committees. ILL scientists and their users publish around 600 articles each year in the international scientific press and in conference proceedings.