µSR

Opening Remarks   by

Jess H. Brewer

Canadian Inst. for Advanced Research
and Dept. of Physics & Astronomy,
Univ. of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z1


This page is under construction at     http://musr.physics.ubc.ca/~jess/musr/

When I was asked to take Tomo Uemura's place in presenting the Introduction to µSR, the title of this talk was given as, ``µSR Principles.'' Given my perception of my own principles and those of some of my colleagues in the µSR community, I felt that this topic would make for a very short talk, so I persuaded Sue to change the title to that you see before you (one link up from this page).

:-)

Now for a more serious Opening remark:

In order for a given experimental method to flourish, there must be a sort of ``impedance matching'' between the availability of necessary resources (both material and human), the development of sophisticated techniques and robust interpretive models, the emergence of timely and exciting applications, the growth of an enthusiastic user community and the initiative of expert practicioners. Of course, apart from faith in ``progress'' generally, there is no obvious reason why one should desire that a given experimental method should flourish - unless one happens to be one of its practicioners, in which case there is no doubt. As a practicioner of muon spin rotation/relaxation/resonance (µSR), I am naturally pleased that µSR has become an indispensible experimental tool of condensed matter physics, chemistry and other material science as well as atomic, subatomic and other fundamental physics disciplines.

This Web Talk outlines the history of µSR, the basic muon physics that makes it possible, the principal µSR techniques and their main areas of application today.


Jess H. Brewer
Last modified: Fri Aug 14 09:57:07 PDT 1998