Arno Hiess

PD Dr. Arno Hiess 

In my role - since 2011 - as Head of the Scientific Activities Division at the European Spallation Source ERIC I am responsible for a team designing, constructing and operating support laboratories, sample environment and the future user office. Jointly with my team I strive for a coherent scientific service and collaborative scientific environment that makes neutrons more accessible, powerful and efficient to users from diverse scientific fields and to harness the method’s full scientific potential. The division will meet the ESS scientific challenges and improve the user experience during operation by maximising cross benefits, ensuring topical balance, streamlining interfaces, integrating with other parts of the facility and increasing the involvement of external expert partners from universities and other research facilities, which often act as ‘in-kind’ partners to ESS.  

My experience is based on my previous work at the Institut Laue Langevin, where I have been responsible from 1997 to 2011 for the three-axis spectrometers IN14, IN8 and IN3. I acted as the scientific advisor for the construction project of the cold three-axis spectrometer ThALES but also lead the successful refurbishment of the thermal neutron three-axis spectrometer IN8C. ILL performed these projects in collaboration with several scientific partners and I put emphasis on a good co-operation of the different technical services at the ILL and with the external industrial partners. 

Throughout my scientific career I used neutron and x-ray scattering techniques as well as transport and magnetisation measurements to investigate magnetic and other electronic phenomena in intermetallic compounds. Those compounds show a great variety of magnetic properties such as ferromagnetic or antiferromagnetic order, mixed valence or heavy fermion behaviour, which may result in a superconducting or insulation groundstate. I have extensive experience in both, sample environment development and neutron instrumentation. My scientific and methodological achievements are captured in my publication record (118 articles incl.17 Nature Series / PRL), illustrated by my habitation (TU Dresden 2009) and the subsequent affiliation as Privatdozent at TU Dresden (since 2009) and as Honorary Professor at NBI, Copenhagen Univ. (2012 - 2017). Together with my team we were successful attracting and executing several European and National grants enhancing ESS' scientific and methodological capabilities. 

Together with several members of my team I will participate in BrightnESS² work package 2 (WP2) especially in liaising with the user community via ENSA and our South African partners. I will also put an emphasis into linking the experience from the two methodological pilot projects in WP2 to the deliverables in WP4 adding value  to neutron usage for industrial users.