Seminars

During the first days of your stay, a series of introductory lectures will make you familiar with the basic principles of neutrons and x-rays :

  • Fundamental principles
  • Techniques used for their production (nuclear reactor, synchrotron)
  • Instrumentation and measurement techniques
  • Interaction with matter

Further on during your stay, various scientists from the ILL and the ESRF will give you insights into some more specific aspects of the application of neutrons and x-rays in a number different scientific fields, such as:

  • Diffraction and structure of materials
  • Imaging
  • Nuclear and particle physics
  • Structural biology
  • Magnetism
  • Spectroscopy and inelastic scattering
  • Soft matter studies
  • and other examples of today's scientific questions

In general, the content and the difficulty of the presentations will be adapted to be accessible for a third-year student who is interested in these subjects.

Project work

During a large portion of your time you will work on an individual scientific project while being embedded in one of the research groups at the ILL or ESRF. You will be tutored by one or several scientists of the institutes, with whom you will work and who will provide assistance and any other help you may need.

These projects are proposed by our research groups and are typically closely related to their current scientific activities. They are therefore quite diverse and may be from any possible field on which the members of our institutes are working. We will try to match these subjects with your personal interests if you mention them to us ; it may also be an opportunity for you to discover a field which is completely new to you.

At the end of your stay, a seminar will be organized in which all participants will give a short presentation of the results they will have obtained.

 And also…

In addition to the series of lectures and your work on a project with one of our research groups, some extra-curricular activities will be organized in the evenings or on weekends, such as for exemple excursions into town or into the mountains surrounding Grenoble.