The Centre for Energy Research (EK-CER) is proud to announce and congratulate to Professor Ferenc Mezei, who has received the 2021 Gothenburg Lise Meitner Award, a prestigious prize of the Chalmers University of Technology (Gothenburg, Sweden, https://www.chalmers.se/en/centres/gpc/activities/lisemeitner/Pages/default.aspx).
Ferenc Mezei has strong relations and long history with EK-CER and the Budapest Research Reactor (BRR) as a part of it. His major inventions as mentioned in the awarding laudation “For the inventions of the neutron spin echo method and the super mirror, which have significantly advanced neutron scattering methods….” belong to BRR. The spin-echo was first demonstrated by Mezei’s experiment at BRR in 1972; as well as the first supermirrors were fabricated at the KFKI and also measured at the reactor. His other invention is also highlighted: “…the long pulse neutron source concept, which is the foundation for the novel technical design of the European Spallation Source now being built in Lund.” This concept was first published in Acta Physica Hungarica is 1994. Time-of-flight techniques in neutron scattering is a basic pillar of the long pulse source concept, Mezei’s contribution to its advancement is essential. This makes multiple enhancements in intensity as well as in spectral and spatial resolution for a major class of neutron instrumentation. For example, the so called ‘repetition rate multiplication’ was first demonstrated at BRR in 2002, and also the first fully fledged instrument of this type was built here (2004), the ‘TOF-ND’ diffractometer of the Budapest Neutron Centre (BNC) – outperforming all other similar instruments worldwide that time. Ferenc Mezei has played a crucial role to establish the instrument suit of BNC, which was created after the major upgrade of the reactor in 1990. He served as chair of the International Scientific Advisory Council of BNC in the period of 1992-2010. Nowadays he is leading a pioneering project for creating a compact accelerator based neutron source (CANS). This is a scarce example of real public-private partnership in R&Đ: EK-CER together with Mirrotron Ltd. is building Europe’s first CANS in Martonvásár, to be commissioned in 2022. This can be the precursor of the transformation of BRR into an accelerator based facility after the decommissioning of the reactor in ~2027. The concept of such a transformation is based on the patent by F. Mezei (accepted in 2021).
