Performance of the 36 m small-angle neutron scattering spectrometer at BATAN, Serpong, Indonesia

A 36 m small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) spectrometer (SMARTer) has been installed at the end of a 49 m long neutron guide tube and located in the neutron guide hall at the Neutron Scattering Laboratory (NSL), Serpong, Indonesia. At present, this is the largest SANS spectrometer in the Asia–Pacific region and consists of an 18 m long tube collimation system and another 18 m long tube to accommodate a 128 × 128 3He two-dimensional position-sensitive detector. The detector can be moved continuously from 1.5 to 18 m and can be shifted laterally by 0.1 m to cover a large range of Q, where Q is the magnitude of the scattering vector given by [Q = (4\pi /\lambda) \sin (\theta /2)], θ is the scattering angle and λ is the wavelength. By selecting the rotational speed of the velocity selector, the incident thermal neutron beam will have a wavelength λ in the range 3–6 Å and a Q range of 0.002–0.6 Å−1. The maximum neutron flux at the sample position is 4 × 106 neutrons cm−2 s−1. Measurements of some standard samples using SMARTer are reported for inter-laboratory comparisons that show, for the first time, how SMARTer's capabilities compare with those of other prominent SANS instruments.