The Budapest neutron school was one of the first to offer – besides theoretical lectures – also hands-on-training on real working neutron spectrometers. The first such event was held in 1998 as an Austro-Hungarian training course. A widely opened international school was first organised on the occasion of the 2nd European Conference on Neutron Scattering in 1999.

Since 2001 we have decided to extend the school into a training course, and offer the hands-on-training possibilities of the cold and thermal neutron beam instruments at BNC for the international user community. In this way our school has become a regular event, and it has got the name CETS – Central European Training School, to respond indeed, to the situation that most of the students are coming from our neighbour countries. In the past 20 years over 500 young scientists from nearly 40 countries have been trained at CETS.

In 2017 we decided to introduce a new structure of the usual one-week programme: instead of mixing lectures and instrumental training, now the lectures are condensed for the first two days, which is followed by the experimental part with extended exercises on the selected instruments. In this way, CETS now provides in a didactic way, insight into the basics of neutron physics and the experimental procedures. The lectures cover the commonly used beam techniques: diffraction, radiography, reflectometry, three-axis spectroscopy, small-angle scattering, prompt gamma activation analysis, time-of-flight techniques and neutron polarisation.