Research Stories

Canadian and U.S. research using neutron beams accelerated the development of hard drives, resulting in an estimated economic benefit to Canada of $800 million.

Producing more food with fewer resources—including less water, less land, and fewer synthetic chemicals—and securing food supplies in a changing environmental and political climate are global concerns.

Social acceptance of nuclear power is linked to the safe, permanent disposal of its used fuel and nuclear waste. Researchers at Western University use neutron beams to generate key knowledge about the long-term reliability of used-fuel storage containers—knowledge that has proven essential for the licensing of geologic repositories.

Generating unique knowledge about aging of submarine fleets has helped Canada cooperate with its allies, leveraging their knowledge in return.

Canada’s fleet of nuclear power plants have realized impacts worth hundreds of millions from research supported by a decade of stress measurements using neutron beams to ensure their safe, reliable and economic operations.

With sponsorship from Tesla Motors, one ‘Gold medal’ Canadian scientist is using neutron beams in the quest to reduce the cost of energy storage technologies, which is vital for the widespread adoption of renewable energy sources and electric vehicles.

IVACO is expanding today, partly because of research using the CNBC that enabled it to add value to its products.

The Canadian energy sector has developed standard practices to ensure that oil and gas pipelines remain safe as they age. For the past decade, these standard practices have been influenced by a team of researchers, including one University of Alberta professor and his industrial partners, who use neutron beams to better understand stress and corrosion in pipeline steel.

After using neutron beams to gather data on why 3D printing sometimes fails, one industry–university collaboration is now offering more reliable printing algorithms.

A University of Manitoba physicist is part of an international research team developing a cancer treatment method that uses magnetic nanoparticles to kill tumours with heat.

Using the probing power of neutron beams, Professor Dimitry Sediako at the University of British Columbia is solving industrial challenges in the development of lighter powertrains for automotive and marine vehicles.

Experiments at the Canadian Neutron Beam Centre (CNBC) confirmed one of the theoretical predictions of this year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics.