iThemba LABS is a national facility of the National Research Foundation (NRF) in South Africa. The NRF promotes and provide state of the art facilities and programmes for high quality research, training and services in nuclear sciences and applications for the benefit of the people of South Africa and the global science community.
Activities at iThemba LABS are based around a number of sub-atomic particle accelerators. The largest of these, a K=200 separated sector cyclotron, accelerates protons to energies of 200MeV, and heavier particles to much higher energies. Consequently, iThemba LABS neutron beam facility can provide quasi-monoenergetic neutron beams with energies in the range 30 – 200 MeV, using the (p,n) reaction on thin Li and Be targets. iThemba LABS currently hosts one of the few existing facilities in the world that can provide the science community with neutron sources of energies above, 30 MeV. This neutron beam facility has been officially designated by the National Metrology Institute of South Africa (NMISA) to be developed as a ‘medium to high energy neutron metrology’ facility, in line with the CIPM MRA (International Committee for Weights and Measures Mutual Recognition Arrangement) requirements.
