The strange history of polarised neutrons in Australia

The history of polarised neutrons in Australia is unusual firstly because of the particular access that individuals in universities had to the facilities at the reactor site and because this resulted in the experiments being done almost all being with polarisation analysis. Two instruments were initially available. One was a conventional instrument albeit with a tilting counter. The other was a primitive polarisation analysis instrument purpose built for diffuse scattering. This latter instrument evolved over more than thirty years and produced results ranging from the separation of magnetic and nuclear diffuse scattering, for which it was conceived, to the isolation of magnetic features in inelastic spectra.