Recently, Cryo-EM has caused the revolution in the field of structural biology and the neutron analysis work using big crystals is said to be out of date. But the only method of experimentally determining hydrogen positions is the neutron diffraction. The reason why the high threshold of using neutron diffraction from the view of a pharmaceutical company is that it takes too long time and too much man power to obtain appropriate crystals and results against the drug discovery’s time-line. There is not promising to get required results by the procedures of data collection and processing for the non-experts of the neutron field. Like Cryo-EM was changed by the direct detector, the breakthrough may change the neutron diffraction technologies in future. Before we wait such a breakthrough, the support system which non-experts can access easily to the neutron analysis involving human resource development should be necessarily. The time is coming to open the macro molecule neutron scattering analysis for non-experts besides neutron macromolecular fields.

Safety review of JRR-3 under the New Regulatory Requirements was completed on 7th November 2018. Neutron beam will come back in early 2021 after reinforcement works of the roof of the reactor building, the peripheral structures like a stack, a cooling tower, and the experimental hall. The future of neutron sciences using the research reactor strongly depends on how many impacted researches using JRR-3 will be achieved after restarting JRR-3. At this stage, we can learn a lot of things from the back numbers of HAMON.

It was announced that JRR-3 will resume its operation at the end of February, 2021. Neutron community has strongly anticipated resume of JRR-3 for a decade. Neutron sciences at JRR-3 have been suspended since March, 2011. There are numbers of problems piled during the past 10 years, and we are facing to overcome them before resume of JRR-3. On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of Hamon and JRR-3, this article overviews the history of JRR-3 and forecasts the future of JRR-3.

In this short note, I first look back the days when the Hamon, a membership journal of the Japanese Society for Neutron Science, had launched. The neutron scattering activities of those days for solid state physics are summarized. Then, a comparison is made to current situation. By an extrapolation, near-future prospect for the neutron scattering community will be analyzed.

Neutron has distinct features as a scattering probe to analyze structure and dynamics of biological macromolecules. The theme of this review is to try to describe how we did/do utilize them. And “How we should utilize them more effectively in the trend of integrative structural biology?” with solution scattering.

Helical magnetic orders have been extensively investigated for many years by means of neutron scattering. Recent intensive studies on multiferroics and magnetic skyrmions have established a consensus that the helimagnetic orders can induce a variety of emergent phenomena, such as spin-driven ferroelectricity, topological Hall effect, etc. In this article, we briefly review a number of key experiments in this research area, and discuss how we develop the neutron scattering techniques to further investigate the physics related to helimagnetism.

We briefly introduce the industrial use of neutrons in R&D of Kao Corporation. Structural analysis of cosmetics (nanometer-size emulsion; NE) and skin (stratum corneum; SC), and recently evaluation of non-soluble neutron absorbers was carried out. In the NE research, the mechanism of shear thickening behavior by mixing NE and polymer was investigated using the Rheo-SANS method. Complementary use of SANS and synchrotron radiation SAXS were effective in analyzing changes in the human SC structure due to immersion in surfactant solutions. The cooperation between the small neutron source (KUANS) and the large neutron source (J-PARC MLF) advanced smoothly from the neutron transmission measurement to the adhesion evaluation of the neutron absorbers. The neutron science community has been very helpful for our research and will become increasingly important for the future industrial use.

Construction of pulsed neutron sources in Japan including J-PARC was strongly driven by university researchers. It is the time for establishing visions and roadmaps of neutron science community by wide and open discussion.

Promoting the use of neutron measurement techniques is essential for maintaining and improving the high technological capabilities of the Japanese manufacturing industry. We introduce an example analyzing a lithium secondary battery by using the Bragg edge imaging method, and then make recommendations on what should be done to disseminate to industry use.

A neutron polarizing supermirror is one of the most important optical elements to polarize neutron beams. The polarizing supermirror needs to display high polarization efficiency over a wide bandwidth under low external field when it is used for a time-of-flight neutron scattering instrument at spallation neutron sources such as the J-PARC MLF. In this article, recent research results on the development of the polarizing supermirror with high-performance conducted to meet a variety of research demands at the MLF are presented.