Download: "ESS Activity Report 2010-2011" (PDF, 5 MB)

Foreword: We look back at a year full of change and progress for ESS, full of excitements and the occasional frustrations, full of uncertainties and promise. Let us look back and see what has been achieved since 1st July last year when we became an independent entity, but let us concentrate on the future - the road ahead.

ESS will be a 5MW long pulse source of slow neutrons, with 22 instruments, and driven by a superconducting proton linac. We have 17 partner countries. ESS will be a very powerful neutron source. But it will be a very different kind of neutron source. Nothing like it has been built before. As such the scientific exploitation of ESS is an important topic deserving of much reflection and innovation. We are taking initiatives now to involve the present and future user community in defining this through our Science and Scientists meetings at Prague and Berlin where we shall stress our emphasis to Get Involved. The ESS Science Symposia, run by specialist groups of researchers, and which are proving to be remarkably popular, will also help to fulfill this goal.

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ESS will be different in many ways - its instrumentation and its green field certainly - but much more fundamentally: the way it relates to the environment; the way it interacts with and embraces its user community; the way it capitalises upon its intellectual property; the way in which it nurtures its staff; the way it operates its instrument suite. Perhaps these are lofty ideals, but they are worth aiming for. We must keep in mind that we are talking about a neutron source which will operate at full specification only in 2025. Life will be different then, and ESS should mirror that.

Help us to define this future!

Colin Carlile

Director of ESS