László Rosta

László Rosta has been working in the field of neutron scattering for nearly 50 years. He has been leading scientific activities at the Budapest Neutron Centre since 1992 and has been engaged with ESS since the very early stage of the project. The ESS idea was born in the early 1990s. For example a major contribution to that was, when Ferenc Mezei published his concept on the long pulse option of spallation sources, which is now being implemented at ESS, in Acta Physica Hungarica in 1994. Soon afterwards, László initiated activities promoting ESS to the local community in Hungary. The country has made a tremendeous effort to contribute to the launching of the ESS project and finally became a Founding Member of the European Spallation Source ERIC. László Rosta has been always in the forefront of advancing the ESS project, also serving as a Hungarian member of the ESS Stearing Committee and the Council between 2009-2019. 

László Rosta graduated from the Lomonosov State University of Moscow in 1973, specialising in solid state and low temperature physics. He obtained his PhD at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest in 1976. This was also endorsed by his habilitation at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1986. He started to work with neutrons at the Budapest Research Reactor (BRR) as instrument responsible for a triple-axis spectrometer, which was one of the first instruments of this type in Europe. In the 1980s he spent nearly 4 years at the ‘Laboratoire Léon Brillouin’ at Saclay (France). He had the chance to witness the commissioning of the Orphée reactor (first neutrons in 1982) and also sadly to be present at its closure in 2019. He was visiting research fellow at the Vienna University in 1994-1995.

During 1986-1990, BRR went through a major upgrade and its power was increased to 10 MW. László was one of those, who have initiated and realised the new research instrument suite at the Budapest Reactor, including a cold neutron source, neutron guide system and various spectrometers. He has been acting as founder of the Budapest Neutron Centre (BNC), a consortium of neutron based laboratories around BRR. Representing BNC and the Hungarian neutron community, he was there to found the European Neutron Scattering Association (ENSA) in 1994.  László served as ENSA delegate of Hungary for 20 years, during this time the country’s neutron community has grown from ~50 to over 200 researchers. Promoting and developing international collaborations has been always in the focus of his interests. He served, for example, as national coordinator for numerous projects in the EU Framework Programmes, starting from WENNET (West-East Neutron Network; 1992, lead by G. Pépy, LLB), which was one of the first 3 grants awarded to a project including Eastern-European countries. Through NMI3 and other EU projects, BNC was collaborating with over 50 institutions in Europe. László’s activity for strengthening French-Hungarian collaborations was honored by the French Prime Minister’s Award: ‘Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Academiques’ (2001). He was the organiser and chair of the 2nd European Conference on Neutron Scattering, gathering 600 scientists in Budapest (ECNS-1999).

Besides neutron instrumentation development he has been studying structure and dynamics of materials by various neutron and other techniques (X-ray, Raman, NMR etc.). In particular, small angle neutron scattering has been extensively used to reveal nano-scale features in materials like liquid crystals, ferrofluids, biological membranes, biocompatible ceramics; or in industrial applications such as welds, turbines. In the past 15 years he has also used neutron techniques for non-destructive investigation of archaeological objects. In this context, leading neutron activities in EU projects (CHARISMA, IPERION), his effort to link heritage science with research infrastructures has resulted in 2020 in Hungary joining formally the new initiative European Research Infrastructure for Heritage Science (E-RIHS).

László Rosta is author/co-author of ~300 publications and a member of numerous scientific bodies. He served for example, as a member of the Scientific Council of ILL and the AUSTRON project. He received a ‘Jánossy Prize’ (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1986) for creating a new type of neutron velocity selectors – many SANS instruments worldwide are equipped with such a device. László has always paid special attention to educating young researchers. He is a regular lecturer in materials science at various universities in Hungary and has been the supervisor of numerous PhD theses at the Budapest Technical University and Eötvös Loránd University doctoral schools. He is the founder of the Central European Training School (CETS), a series of professional training courses in neutron scattering organised since 1999.

Besides basic research tasks, he has always been committed to turning scientific results into applications, seeking all kinds of opportunities in studying materials structures, such as semi- and superconductors, alloys, composites, engineering components – among others those of transport industry, e.g. a remarkable study was about the life-time prolongation of Ferrari racing car engines. He has gained experience in technology transfer, mostly in methodical developments of neutron instrumentation, so that commercialisation of scientific devices has been realised by SMEs – mostly by those spin-off companies, which have had extensive collaboration with BNC. One of them and the most significant is Mirrotron Ltd., created by F. Mezei, L. Rosta and others in 1992. This company today is an important supplier of neutron equipment for ESS.