2015 has been another very productive year for the Bragg Institute. As of 18 December, the Institute has published a total of 145 refereed journal articles. In addition, our staff gave a total of 33 invited talks at major national and international conferences in North America, Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand. To date, 583 refereed articles from the new OPAL instruments have been published, 96 of them in this calendar year.
Industrial research continues to take off, with 41 days of commercial beam usage this year, roughly 3 times the level in 2014, spread across 4 of our instruments. On top of this, between 35% and 40% of non-proprietary proposals submitted through the merit process identify a specific industrial relevance.
User feedback is running at record levels, both in terms of volume and in terms of scores given for our service.
Two more instruments (SIKA and BILBY) have been awarded their operating licences in the last year, and are now in the user program. OPAL's 13th instrument (EMU) should achieve the same status early in 2016, and we are now engaged in getting a 14th instrument transferred from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin.
All in all, another excellent year of progress!