Each summer the National School on Neutron and X-Ray Scattering trains a group of about sixty student researchers, chosen from applicants across the United States. The admissions process is highly selective.

This year, the Department of Materials Science & Engineering Department had four graduate students accepted for the summer course.  Zongyang Lyu (advised by Peter Liaw), Sreya Paladugu (advised by Kate Page), Lu Yu (co-advised by David Harper and David Keffer), and Di Xie (advised by Yanfei Gao) are attending the 22nd National School on Neutron & X-ray Scattering (NXS) from June 15–26, 2020.

The NXS is conducted online this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic. NXS endeavors to present the students with “as much insight into large scale facility research using neutrons and x-ray as possible on a virtual platform”. Although the students won’t have hands-on experience using neutron and synchrotron sources at Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) and Oak Ridge’s Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) and High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) facilities, they are participating in high-quality lectures and videos, presented by researchers from academia, industry, and national laboratories.

NXS enables the students to have a basic knowledge of the principles of scattering theory, the characteristics of the sources, and the application of scattering methods to a variety of scientific subjects. Based on the experiences of previous UTK MSE graduates of NXS, this course prepares them to extract the most insight from the scattering data generated by APS, SNS and HFIR when they access these user-facilities for their own materials research.