Informative Talk by Prof Michihiro Furusaka

A Nuclear Talk organised by the collaboration of Mechanical Department, College of Engineering UNITEN has been held successfully on 8^th of December 2011. The talk intended to broaden local students view on the current nuclear technology as has been developed by other country. 

The Talk has been delivered by Prof Michihiro Furusaka, from Graduate School of Engineering, University of Hokkaido, Japan. His main interests of research are neutron science, instrumentation/neutron radiation source and the device. Currently, he does actively involve in new mini-focusing small angle neutron scattering instrument. In this talk, Prof. Michihiro Furusaka enlightens us on his involvement in neutron scattering and its relations to Parkinson’s and hair follicles. He explains about quantum beam and its applications; including in nuclear engineering.

Prof. Michihiro Furusaka

What is Quantum Beam?

The origin of “quantum beam” can be found from the discovery of radiation. X-rays were discovered from natural radioisotopes, and other radiation such as α, β, γ-rays, and neutrons were found afterwards.

It is well known that α-rays are helium nuclei, β-rays are electrons and X-rays and γ-rays are electromagnetic waves (another type of light). In the beginning, natural radiation sources (radioisotopes) were used for radiation research. Recent progress in technology provides artificial radiation sources, such as ion/electron accelerators, ultra-high intensity laser systems, synchrotron radiation, spallation neutron sources and nuclear reactors for the utilization of various beams.

These beams obtained from artificial radiation sources provide desirable characteristics such as high intensity, high coherence, monochromaticity, short-pulse, micro-focus and so on. Such highly controlled artificial radiation is referred to as a “quantum beam”.


Furthermore, Prof Dr Michihiro Furusaka also explained about the situation of nuclear scattering and proton particle beam accelerators in Malaysia.

What is Neutron Scattering?

Small-angle scattering (of light, X-rays, and neutrons) is a unique nano-structural characterization technique capable of obtaining exactly this; providing average morphological parameters over volumes ranging from cubic micrometers to cubic centimeters. The widespread adoption of this technique, however, has been hindered by a complicated data interpretation as well as instrumental limitations.

He started of the talk by giving a brief overview of the current situation  in large neutron facilities. He also said that Small Angle Neutron Scattering instrument (SANS) are huge and expensive. Maintaining a neutron facility is expensive and not always available in developing countries. The instruments also requires lot of manpower and budget to maintain SANS machine

Research activities using neutron scattering techniques are strongly hampered by its limited machine-time availability. We need very large facilities, either a research reactor or an accelerator driven neutron source, and the number of such facilities all over the world is rather limited. Also true is the number of instruments at such facilities. As a result, getting machine time of one of such instruments is also severely limited; often they are oversubscribed by a factor of three or more.

In case of X-ray, there are a lot of laboratory based X-ray instruments all over the place. Instruments are commercially available; researchers can test their ideas or new samples without writing a proposal; many researchers know how to analyze data. If you need a more powerful instrument, synchrotron radiation facilities are there.

One way of overcoming this situation around neutron scattering technique, especially for SANS instrument, would be to develop a compact unit instrument that can be installed many on a beamline. The unit should be of low cost and can also be installed at low power accelerator based neutron sources. The answer to this is the mfSANS instrument. By using a neutron-focusing technique, like an ellipsoidal mirror developed, a very compact SANS instrument was made. Current ones are 2.5 and 4m in total lengths. Many devices have to be developed, such as high intensity monochromator, beam branching device, high quality focusing mirror, and detector with high-resolution high-count-rate/highdetecting efficiency. Also important is to develop easy to use software.

Prof Dr Michihiro Furusaka successfully obtained about 2.5 mm FWHM focused beam at the detector position using a 2 mm aperture at one of the two focal points of the focusing mirror. SANS data was obtained from standard samples, such as Ni powder of 20 nm in diameter and micro-separated block-copolymer DI33.

He highlighted the issues of SANS for low power reactors; which is the efficiency of conversing collimator and loosely focused beam. The possible solutions proposed are converging multi-holes collimator from a bigger sample, and utilizing loosely focused beam by focusing mirrors.

The lecture was cut short due to time constraints, but it was a very informative and eye opening lecture about quantum beam technology and its role in nuclear engineering.

We were very honored to have Prof Michihiro Furusaka as a speaker to this talk as we learnt a lot of new things about nuclear engineering. To conclude this, we have some pictures taken during his talk.