New Opportunities for Neutrons in Environmental and Biological Sciences

doi:10.1007/s11783-024-1852-z

Front. Environ. Sci. Eng.

2024, Vol. 18

Issue (7) : 92 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11783-024-1852-z

New Opportunities for Neutrons in Environmental and Biological Sciences

Alexander Johs(

), Shuo Qian(

), Leighton Coates, Brian H. Davison, James G. Elkins, Xin Gu, Jennifer Morrell-Falvey, Hugh O’Neill, Jeffrey M. Warren, Eric M. Pierce, Kenneth Herwig

Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37831, USA

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Abstract

● Neutrons reveal the structure and dynamics of materials nondestructively.

● Neutron methods probe complex systems across a wide range of length and time scales.

● Advances in instruments and source enable smaller samples and time-resolved studies.

● Multi-modal techniques and deuteration capabilities enable new science.

● Processes in soil, water, plants, microbes from enzymes to organisms.

The use of neutron methods in environmental and biological sciences is rapidly emerging and accelerating with the development of new instruments at neutron user facilities. This article, based on a workshop held at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), offers insights into the application of neutron techniques in environmental and biological sciences. We highlight recent advances and identify key challenges and potential future research areas. These include soil and rhizosphere processes, root water dynamics, plant-microbe interactions, structure and dynamics of biological systems, applications in synthetic biology and enzyme engineering, next-generation bioproducts, biomaterials and bioenergy, nanoscale structure, and fluid dynamics of porous materials in geochemistry. We provide an outlook on emerging opportunities with an emphasis on new capabilities that will be enabled at the Spallation Neutron Source Second Target Station currently under design at ORNL. The mission of scientific neutron user facilities worldwide is to enable science using state-of-the-art neutron capabilities. We aim to encourage researchers in the environmental and biological research community to explore the unique capability afforded by neutrons at these facilities.

Keywords Neutrons Environment Biology Neutron imaging Neutron scattering Second Target Station (STS)

Corresponding Author(s): Alexander Johs,Shuo Qian

About author:

Li Liu and Yanqing Liu contributed equally to this work.

Issue Date: 18 April 2024

Cite this article:

Alexander Johs,Shuo Qian,Leighton Coates, et al. New Opportunities for Neutrons in Environmental and Biological Sciences[J]. Front. Environ. Sci. Eng., 2024, 18(7): 92.

URL:

https://academic.hep.com.cn/fese/EN/10.1007/s11783-024-1852-z
https://academic.hep.com.cn/fese/EN/Y2024/V18/I7/92

Fig.1 (A) Neutron tomography of a lupine root system grown in sandy soil in a 27 mm diameter quartz glass column. Neutrons are able to map the water and root distribution in the root-soil system with little attenuation from soil. Adapted fromT?tzke et al. (2017). (B) An example of contrast matching in neutron scattering. Certain classes of biomolecules can be masked by adjusting the D₂O/H₂O ratio of the background solution, therefore making certain parts of the sample invisible. (C) An example of unlabeled proteins (pink) masked in 42% D₂O enabling the selective study of the deuterated protein component (blue).

Tab.1 Overview of STS instruments, neutron techniques, and sample types

Fig.2 The preliminary layout of the eight initial instruments at STS.

Fig.3 Time and length scales covered by the initial STS instruments. Instruments in the lower section of the illustration are “elastic” instruments for structure studies and do not measure changes in the neutron energy in dynamics studies.

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