Call for Proposals - 2011A update

The CNMS has just completed the first Call for User Proposals of two that are planned for 2011. This proposal call featured several new instruments that were recently purchased with American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds, including new SEM and TEM/STEM capabilities for soft materials, small-angle x-ray scattering, and in the cleanroom, advanced optical profilometry.

There were 166 proposals reviewed for the 2011A call, and 96 of those were approved following external peer review. These new projects will have an access date of February 1, 2011. Also in this proposal call we piloted a process for CNMS users to request beamtime for neutron scattering experiments within their CNMS proposal and 10 PIs took advantage of this opportunity.

Future proposal calls are planned twice annually with deadlines in early May and mid-October to apply for CNMS access commencing on August 1 and February 1 respectively. Accordingly, the next proposal deadline will be May 4, 2011, to apply for access starting August 1, 2011.

We hosted 360 unique users, of whom 52% were first-time visitors. We also had 75% of these users from outside of ORNL. We accumulated 48,000 user hours, which is nearly 20% increase over FY09.

The next proposal deadline is Wednesday, March 2, 2011, for experiment period June - November 2011.