Port-GISANS: Revealing functionality in lipid membranes

Project title: Port-GISANS: Revealing functionality in lipid membranes
Main applicant: Max Wolff, Division of Materials Physics
Grant amount: SEK 7 944 238 for the period 2022-2025

Port GISANS will be an portable neutron optics adaptation enabling grazing-incidence scattering studies on SANS instruments. It converts the parallel but wide beam cross section of a SANS instrument into several parallel line-shaped beams suited for surface diffraction. As SANS instruments will be available at ESS from day one, the project closes a capability gap for science at ESS. Science cases in the field of biological membranes and complex soft matter interfaces are part of this project.

The performance of Port GISANS will be demonstrated at existing neutron SANS instruments, as KWS1/2 at MLZ, but optimized for the use at the ESS SANS instruments. As a compact system, Port GISANS is portable and can be used on virtually any SANS instrument. By enhancing the incident flux onto a sample under grazing incidence and providing an excellent signal to noise ratio, it will strengthen and expand the usage of surface scattering techniques in many fields of science, such as life science, energy materials, advanced functional materials and soft matter interfaces.

Since ESS will be the world leading neutron source, we expect a significant gain in GISANS resolution and reduced counting time, down to the order of minutes, compared to existing sources. In combination with Port GISANS we expect this to unlock the study of interface problems in biophysics, currently not addressed by GISANS, such as single molecular layers and weak signals of biomembranes and DNA composites.