Superconducting neutron transmission imaging for investigating a sequential change in phase separations of low-melting Wood’s metal

Abstract

We built a new cryostat system for a current-biased kinetic inductance detector (CB-KID) to be able to place a sample at room temperature for conducting the neutron transmission imaging experiments with pulsed neutrons. A Wood’s metal alloy sample (Bi 50wt.%, Pb 25wt.%, Sn 12.5wt.%, Cd 12.5wt.%) of melting temperature 75.2°C was used to check a practical test by observing fine microstructures under beam power of 812 kW at beamline BL10 of J-PARC (MLF). The Wood’s metal is composed of four phases, of which one is a Cd-rich needle-like phase of an average width of 25 µm and length of 5 mm. Since Cd is a strong neutron absorber, it is suitable for observing the fine mosaic structure contrastingly in neutron transmission imaging. After neutron-transmission imaging with the Wood’s metal in the initial state, we subsequently melted the Wood’s metal sample and solidified it again by slow cooling during the same beam time. We were successful in observing an impressive change in morphology of the phases by neutron-transmission imaging. Room-temperature sample imaging is very convenient for possible users, and is expected to be very useful for applying our CB-KID system to versatile different materials of interests.