User Meeting 2022: Back to reality!

225 participants came to Munich for the MLZ User Meeting 2022. © FRM II / TUM

225 participants came to Munich for the MLZ User Meeting 2022. © FRM II / TUM

Finally – after two years of virtual conferences – the MLZ was happy to welcome 225 participants in person to this year’s User Meeting on December 8th – 9th. Besides 61 talks and a poster session, there was a clear focus on the future of neutron science at MLZ with a strong commitment of the three MLZ partners to refurbish the instrument suite.
The first day was dedicated to specialized workshops organized by the MLZ Science Groups Materials Science, Neutron Methods, Nuclear, Particle and Astrophysics, Quantum Phenomena, Soft Matter, Structure Research and Positrons. Short films on the MLZ YouTube channel give an impression, and there are a lot of pictures on Twitter under the hashtag #MLZUsers. In the evening, conference dinner was held at the “Augustiner Bräustuben”.

MORIS project to upgrade MLZ instrument suite

On the second day, the MLZ Scientific Directors, Prof. Dr. Peter Müller-Buschbaum (Technical University of Munich) and Prof. Dr. Martin Müller (Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon), gave an update on the current situation at the MLZ and discussed their ideas on the scope of the MLZ Organized Refurbishment of the the Instrument Suite (MORIS) project with all participants. A dedicated user workshop on 26 and 27 April 2023 will allow the users to have an impact on the MORIS project. Furthermore, scientific plenary talks by Dr. Henry E. Fischer (Institut Laue-Langevin) and Dr. Frank Weber (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) made this day.

“Strong and active user community”

Prof. Dr. Markus Braden from University of Cologne and representative of 1700 German neutron users in the Komitee Forschung mit Neutronen stated in his talk that “the MLZ is by far the most important neutron source in Europe for German researchers using neutrons”. And the chair of the MLZ User Committee, Prof. Dr. Tommy Nylander from Lund Unversity, finshed the presentations with stressing the importance of the MLZ User Meeting: “More than 200 people don’t come here for the fun. It shows that there is a strong and active user community.”
The concluding poster session with more than 100 posters showed that there was a need for discussing science cases face-to-face, in reality.