New Neutron Reflectometry terms

[nitrosx]

New terms label

• Specular Neutron Reflectometry
  • Polarised Specular Neutron Reflectometry
    • Polarisation analysis Polarised Specular Neutron Reflectometry
• Off-Specular Neutron Reflectometry
  • Polarised Off-Specular Neutron Reflectometry
    • Polarisation analysis Polarised Off-Specular Neutron Reflectometry

Definition (required)

I will request the scientist to provide a definition for all the terms

Position in the hierarchy or the parent class (required)

Parent term: Neutron Reflectometry

Synonyms

none to the best of my knowledge

Cross-references

n/a

Motivation

At ESS, we are working in setting up the data curation for all the instruments, including tagging all the dataset with the correct technique contained in this ontology.
While working on Reflectometry, the scientist highlighted the missing terms.

[kara-mela]

Hi @nitrosx, thanks for the request. It's great that the neutron part of PaNET will be better covered.

It would be great if you could provide some journal articles where the proposed methods are used. It's absolutely fine to use publications from your researchers.

@majumdararn and @thamnos, it would be great to have your opinions here.

[thamnos]

I agree that the neutron reflectometry area is not sufficiently covered, @nitrosx. We have a discussion going on over at issue #269, where we see even more categories -- so many, in fact, that the issue was nicknamed "explosion of terms"...

We did not see the distinction between specular and off-specular though, since you always have off-specular scattering in the measured signal. This is up for discussion though, and I think the whole topic is a discussion that we should continue!

[nitrosx]

I confess my ignorance on the topic.
I will confer with the scientist and post back here

[paracini]

I provided Max with the rough outline of the hierarchy posted above and I now realise that it is not very correct. As mentioned above, on most reflectometer whenever there is off-specular signal the specular reflection is also measured, which is typically much stronger than the off-specular, so something more correct would be:

• Specular Neutron Reflectometry
  • Polarised Specular Neutron Reflectometry
    • Polarised Specular Neutron Reflectometry with Polarisation Analysis

Where each one of these can have an off-specular tag in case there is off-specular signal

The hierarchy above is quite general and depends on the instrumental set up, for polarised measurements a polariser (before the sample) needs to be in the beam and for a polarised measurement with polarisation analysis a polariser (before the sample) and an analyser (after the sample) need to be in place.

Another useful tag, together with off-specular would be relative to the type of interface studied, this is very informative and there are only these options:
solid/gas (can be vacuum)
solid/liquid
liquid/gas
liquid/liquid

[nitrosx]

To confirm what @paracini has already posted above, we would like to have the following terms adopted in the PANET ontology:

• Specular Neutron Reflectometry
  • Polarised Specular Neutron Reflectometry
    • Polarised Specular Neutron Reflectometry with Polarisation Analysis

Tags and additional description will be add and done in the data catalogue at the dataset level