Polarized 3He Gas Circulating Technologies for Neutron Analyzers

Wide angle neutron analyzers require large volumes of polarized 3He gas that must maintain very high polarization. As these instruments have increased in size, they have outstripped 3He polarization capacity, shortening the run times and adversely affecting. A very high productivity source of polarized 3He and a method for flushing these instruments is needed for the next generation of neutron analyzers. We propose to develop an analyzer system that mates our large volume, low cost 3He polarizer to a large volume analyzer, so that the instrument may be frequently refilled and therefore be kept online. This proposal is to develop the gas handling technology to accomplish this. Commercial Applications and Other Benefits: The direct benefit of this project is to enable new experiments and increase data rates in the neutron scattering experiments. Since neutron scattering is widely used in materials science research, increasing the analyzer availability would increase the availability for the beam for commercial research. There is a small but important market for this technology at nuclear physics laboratories around the world for applications in addition to neutron scattering. Also the gas handling technology proposed here may be important in the growing field of hyperpolarized gas MRI for medical imaging.