ICONE – Towards a French HiCANS Neutron Source for materials science and industry

We present the ICONE project which proposes to build a HiCANS source in France. The aim of the ICONE project is to be able to provide the French neutron user community sufficient instrumental capacity to continue performing neutron scattering experiments for their research programs. The baseline goal is to offer performances equivalent to a medium power research reactor or spallation source (such as Orphée or ISIS). We consider that such a machine would fulfil the needs of at least two-thirds of the users which not require ultimate performances but simply beam-time to perform their experiments. We also describe the experimental work ongoing at Saclay around the various technologies necessary to build a HiCANS.