Inprentus manufactures the world’s most advanced diffraction gratings for x-ray applications, offering unparalleled efficiency and high resolving power
Inprentus has been awarded a $427,300 contract to provide Lawrence Berkeley National Lab’s Advance Light Source (ALS) with 6 diffraction gratings for its facility upgrade, 2 for the COSMIC beamline, and 4 for the MAESTRO beamline.
The upgraded ALS will occupy the same facility as the current ALS, replacing the existing electron storage ring and leveraging $500 million in existing ALS infrastructure and experimental systems. Recent accelerator physics breakthroughs now enable the production of highly focused beams of soft x-ray light that are at least 100 times brighter than those of the existing ALS. The upgraded facility will produce bright, steady beams of high-energy light to probe matter with unprecedented detail. Applying this technology at the ALS will help enable a better understanding of and development of new materials and chemical systems needed to advance our energy, economic, and national security needs in the 21st century, securing the United States’ world scientific leadership for decades to come.
To allow users to take full advantage of the source’s state of the art upgraded capabilities, the ALS requires advanced cutting-edge optics. The cutting-edge variable line spacing (VLS) blazed gratings, provided by Inprentus, will be part of beamline optical instrumentation. Inprentus’ differentiating capability to produce a blaze angle of less than 2 degrees across the grating, as well as providing the highest efficiency and resolving power and an ultra-low blaze angle to accommodate grazing optics with a large beam footprint, were important factors in the choice to award Inprentus with this contract.
“The Inprentus team has dedicated many years of planning and scientific excellence into qualifying for this mammoth project. We are excited to take on this challenge and have already started delivering the gratings way ahead of schedule. That is why Inprentus is sought-after in the gratings industry – we have lowered the barrier for radiation hard, scientifically complex, master diffraction gratings with high-performance deliverables, in addition to our industry-leading fast turn-around time. We will continue to expand on this excellence,” explained Jeff MacDonald, Inprentus CEO.
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Image: Diffraction Grating Manufactured by Inprentus