JCNS Proposals

In the online form you have to enter the basic information about your proposal. Most items should be obvious. Here are explanations for the more specific questions:

Proposers: At the time of submission the first author of the proposal has to be registered user of the JCNS electronic proposal system. For EU supported proposals this scientist is the 'group leader'.(This means she/he has to be from an eligible country and her/his name will be entered into the EU database.) All other proposers are entered by name here. Communication will only be sent to the first proposer. When signing up for the visit to perform the experiment also the co-authors have to be registered in the system.

Continuation proposal: A continuation will only be accepted if an experimental report of the previous experiment has been submitted.

Internal proposal: The option 'yes' is reserved for proposals by JCNS staff.

Sample availability: If you do not have your sample ready to be measured mention here when it will be available (e.g. from April, six weeks after notification...). If you leave this field open we will assume that you already have an experiment-ready sample.

Activation after experiment: Please estimate the activation of your sample after the experiment. A table for this purpose is included in the 'Neutron Data Book' issued by ILL, Grenoble. If you are in doubt ask your Instrument Responsible. If you are sure that activation will not take place you may enter a zero.

EU support: If your group experimenters' group comes from an EU country or associated state you are entitled to request support for travel expenses from the

NMI3 access programme. Note that the majority of experimenters (>50%) and the group leader have to be from EU or associated countries.

Text body

In order to write a good proposal a few rules should be obeyed:

File format: You will have to upload the text as PDF. If you do not have Adobe's Distiller you may use free software as

PDFcreator or

Ghostscript. If you run TeX there is usually an option to convert the DVI file to PDF.

Text size: Do not exceed the length of two pages. The length will be checked when you upload the PDF file. Do not use smaller fonts than 12pt.

Figures: It is good to use figures but try to avoid large graphics files. Please use figure sizes which allow discrimination of symbols and legibility of labels. (Reducing the figure size usually does not reduce the file size.)

Content: The proposal should give the referee a self-contained description of your experiment. You can use citations but the essential facts should be repeated in your text. The information given in the proposal should be

Especially the last point requires some care. A calculation as "5 samples x 5 temperatures x 2h per scan = 50 hours" is always good to convince the referees not to shorten your beam time to press more experiments into the available time. Also for diffraction type experiments the question may arise why an experiment cannot be done by x-ray scattering, so mention advantages as contrast variation by isotope substitution etc.

In general we apply the same criteria to the care used writing a proposal as other facilities do. So please take the task serious to avoid delays or even rejection.

Let's state it frankly: Writing proposals is an additional burden imposed by bureaucracy. But neutron scattering experiments are pretty expensive and so it has to be justified where the money goes. But there may also be a positive effect of writing a proposal. If you go through all the points it will help yourself to define what you expect from the experiment and to determine how to achieve this. A good planning documented in a well-written proposal will be a helpful guideline during the execution of your experiment.

Citations: Please cite only materials which are available to referees with reasonable efforts. If information is contained in rare journals please cite it explicitly. Do not cite experimental reports because we do not yet have an electronic reports data base as e.g. ILL! If your proposal is a continuation of earlier work at FZJülich please attach the report to the proposal file.

Submission

We only accept electronic proposals via the online system at

https://fzj.frm2.tum.de. (Provisionally excepted are proposals for CRG instruments at ILL which can be submitted by e-mail until the deadline in Novembefr 2007.)

Only timely proposals are accepted! Proposals not arriving before the deadline will be transferred to the next round. Also a proposal can only be replaced by an improved version if the revision is submitted before the deadline.

Rule on 'alternative submissions': A proposal may be submitted to several facilities (e.g. JCNS and ILL) at the same time if an overlap of proposal rounds requires this. Nevertheless, we have the policy not to give 'double' beam time. If you have submitted (or intend to submit) your proposal identically or with the same scientific oblective to another facility you have to state this in the proposal text. In that case you must notify JCNS if you receive beam time by the other facility and it will be determined if you need JCNS time in addition.