In biological membranes, functional domains or so-called lipid “rafts” have proven difficult to study systematically, owing in part to their chemical complexity and that of membrane composition, which often contains thousands of different biomolecules, including hundreds of distinct lipid species. Neutron scattering techniques have recently proven capable of studying nanoscopic lipid heterogeneities populating spherical vesicles. However, the development of analytical approaches capable of predicting and analyzing nanoscopic lipid phase separation from such experiments has not kept up with experiment. Importantly, neutron scattering techniques are among the few capable of providing nanoscale structural and dynamical information without the need of extrinsic probes (e.g., fluorescent labels) that are sometimes known to alter the interactions responsible for lipid rafts formation.

Transbilayer asymmetry is a ubiquitous yet poorly understood aspect of biological membranes. Increasing evidence suggests that the lipid compositional asymmetry of plasma membranes (PMs) not only confines specific lipids to the exoplasmic leaflet (in the case of sphingomyelin) or cytoplasmic leaflet (in the case of aminophospholipids), but also results in unique membrane properties that are almost certainly crucial for normal cellular function (Figure 1). The vast majority of biophysical studies make use of symmetric model membranes to study biomembrane characteristics, including structure and dynamics as well as the behavior of membrane proteins – even though these highly simplified models most likely fail to capture crucial aspects of the PM environment. With the use of a host of techniques, including neutron scattering, we aim to understand the structural and dynamic impact lipid asymmetry has on the PM.

Fatigue failures in engineering structures can cause catastrophic accidents without any obvious warning. Understanding cyclic-deformation and fatigue failure mechanisms is critical for designing fatigue-resistant novel structure materials. Recently, an intriguing new class of metallic structural materials – High-Entropy Alloys (HEAs), shows great potential in the engineering field. However, the fundamental understanding of the fatigue behavior that is strongly correlated with practical applications is very scarce.

The density of a liquid is comparable to that of a solid. As you now Ice is lighter than water; otherwise the Titanic would not have gone down. Liquid is a condensed matter in which motions of atoms are highly correlated. It is challenging to figure out the atomic dynamics in liquid, and this held back the liquid state physics well behind the solid state physics. But the importance of liquid is growing, in energy storage (electrolyte), dielectrics (insulating layer in FET), and in life sciences. In solids atomic dynamics is described in terms of phonons and diffusion. But in liquids the time-scales of the two are comparable, so phonons are strongly damped and partially localized. At short-range diffusive atomic dynamics is not totally random-walk. The dynamic structure factor, S(Q, ), measured by inelastic scattering, is dominated by coherent quasi-elastic scattering, and it is not easy to interpret the results.

Quantum magnets are a natural source of new quantum states of matter encompassing different types of spin liquids, crystals of topological solitons and magnetically ordered states with non-classical spin dynamics. Remarkably, this complexity emerges from competing interactions between spin degrees of freedom, that are the basic building blocks of quantum magnets. Neutron scattering probes are key for detecting and characterizing these novel states of matter because they excite magnetic modes with arbitrary wave length ranging from one to hundreds of lattice spaces.