Design and estimated performance of a new neutron guide system for the NCNR expansion project

An integral part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Center for Neutron Research (NCNR) expansion project is the addition of five cold neutron guide tubes serving multiple experimental stations in an expanded guide hall. The guides have curved-straight arrangements in the horizontal plane, employing horizontally or vertically defocusing and focusing sections in some cases to improve transmission efficiency or for beam reshaping. The horizontally curved sections eliminate direct lines of sight between the source and the experimental stations, and the outer (concave) surfaces generally have higher critical angles than the inner (convex) surfaces. These features result in well-filtered cold neutron beams with no intensity losses at shorter wavelengths with respect to curved guides having the higher critical angle coatings on both surfaces. For all guides the critical angle of the outer coating of the curved section is selected to achieve a desirable characteristic wavelength, consistent with the instrument requirements. On guides where the scattering-plane beam divergence must be strictly limited, the inner radial coatings of the curved sections and the side coatings and lengths of the final straight sections are chosen to produce the desired beam divergence while the outer radial coating is selected so as to obtain a spatial-angular uniformity of the transmitted beam that is not achievable using a curved guide alone. The long-wavelength transmission of such guides tends to exceed that of equivalent straight guides using crystal filters.