For many years, Europe had the most productive neutron community, regularly producing about half of the world’s publications in the field. This success story was based on two main factors: (i) a healthy ecosystem of neutron facilities, where the flagship was supported by medium and smaller neutron research facilities, and (ii) open access to these facilities based on a peer-reviewed proposal system.

In recent years, we have seen that this system has become increasingly fragile as older research reactors have been decommissioned. We are left with only four large facilities in Europe (ILL, MLZ, ISIS and SINQ) offering a broad range of instruments, and a few small to medium-sized facilities offering a more specialised range of instruments. In recent years, the four major user facilities have not been in continuous operation due to maintenance, planned upgrades and technical problems (apart from Covid). Clearly, such a facility landscape cannot support a large user community of about 5000 users. In particular, in order to establish the next generation of neutron scientists, access for graduate students must be assured at the level of several successful beamtimes during a PhD project. Clearly, a more diverse neutron ecosystem is needed if Europe is to maintain its leading position in research with neutrons and if it is to realize the full potential of the future flagship facility, the ESS!

Hand in hand with LENS, the European Low Energy accelerator-based Neutron facilities Association (ELENA) has taken up this challenge. Partners from France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Norway, Spain and Sweden are working together to make a dream come true: to build a new generation of neutron research facilities that can replace the former network of research reactors. Recent methodological developments have made the so-called High Current Accelerator-based Neutron Sources (HiCANS) feasible. They are characterised by several distinctive features such as high brightness, efficient neutron utilisation, reliability and resilience due to modular design, easy access and reduced licensing requirements.

At Forschungszentrum Jülich, together with Hereon, University of Frankfurt, and many other partners, we are promoting the most ambitious of these projects, the High Brilliance Neutron Source (HBS). The HBS is designed to provide a full suite of 25 competitive instruments for scattering, analytics, and imaging.

Looking ahead, the flexibility and scalability of HiCANS offer great potential to complement and expand neutron scattering capabilities in Europe. Collaboration between networks, such as between ELENA and LENS, will be key in identifying opportunities for HiCANS and aid their integration into the European neutron ecosystem.