Forty-five university students recently got an exciting opportunity to visit MAX IV and PETRA III, attend lectures, and explore beamline technologies hands-on through the MATRAC I School. The educational programme, held in March this year, provides knowledge on the application of neutron and X-ray radiation in engineering materials science.
The school’s name, MATRAC, is an acronym for ‘materials’ and Röntgen-Ångström Cluster (RÅC), a German-Swedish collaboration designed to strengthen materials science and structural biology research through use of neutron and synchrotron sources. The school is open to master’s and PhD students in Europe. Funding is primarily by the German and Swedish governments.
“The lectures are given by international experts, about half of the lecturers are instrument scientists, giving the theoretical basis for the practical experiments at their instruments,” said Martin Müller, materials physicist and Head of the MATRAC School. “For the MATRAC I programme, students visit PETRA III in Hamburg and MAX IV in Lund. In autumn 2024, we will have MATRAC II at Research Neutron Source Heinz Maier-Leibnitz, FRM II, in Garching, Munich.”
In spring 2023, practical study at MAX IV included experiments at Balder beamline for X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy (XAS) and X-ray Emissions Spectroscopy (XES), CoSAXS beamline for Small-Angle X-ray Scattering (SAXS), DanMAX beamline for Powder X-ray Diffraction, and ForMAX beamline for imaging, and Small and Wide Angle X-ray Scattering (SWAXS).
