Synchrotron beamline scientists around the world benefit from advancements in diffraction grating specifications, providing improved efficiency and high resolving power for x-ray optics applications

Champaign, Illinois, USA, November 10th, 2020: Inprentus serves the x-ray optics scientific community globally, providing blazed diffraction gratings for synchrotron and free electron laser light sources around the world. These ultra-high precision optical components help scientists gather data on materials science research and study the physical properties of matter. This important data furthers the development of research on semiconductor materials, pharmaceuticals, cellular biology, and condensed matter physics, allowing scientists to study the magnetism, conductivity, light absorption & emission, and reactivity of matter.

Inprentus has been awarded a contract to provide Lawrence Berkeley National Lab’s Advanced Light Source (ALS) with a diffraction grating for its MERLIN beamline. This tangentially curved VLS (variable line spacing) blazed grating will be part of the upgraded optical instrumentation, ultimately providing scientists with data on the structure of heterogeneous materials. This data helps scientists to gain a deeper understanding of semiconductors and metals with exotic low temperature superconducting or topological properties, as well as thin film and material interface properties. The capability to produce gratings with a blaze angle of less than 2 degrees across the grating was an important specification for this project.

Inprentus received another important order for a custom blazed diffraction grating from Brazil’s LNLS SIRIUS synchrotron, to be installed in the Ipê (Inelastic and Photo-Electron spectroscopy) beamline. The Inprentus diffraction grating will be a plane VLS (variable line spacing) blazed grating with a blaze angle of 1.4 degrees; high resolving power will be optimized at the energy range encompassing the absorption edges of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. Soft X-rays from this synchrotron light source interact mostly with the lowest energy electrons of atoms, which are responsible for most of the macroscopic properties of materials such as magnetism, conductivity, light absorption and emission, and reactivity. This new low energy grating provided by Inprentus will allow the users of the IPE beamline to investigate a wide variety of carbon-based materials, from graphene devices to organic polymers and biological samples.

“We continue to grow our customer base in the synchrotron and free electron laser market with key customers like Brazil’s SIRIUS and ALS in the US,” noted Ron van Os, Inprentus’ CEO. “With years of solid experience providing the world’s leading synchrotrons with key diffractive optics, the company is ready to grow towards new applications and new markets.”

Brazilian Synchrotron Light Laboratory (LNLS)

The Brazilian Synchrotron Light Laboratory (LNLS) is responsible for the operation of the only synchrotron light source in Latin America. LNLS hosts academic and industrial researchers from many countries and is an important open-use research institution for the region. LNLS is commissioning Sirius, a new 4th generation light source.

Inprentus Inc.

Inprentus designs, manufactures, and sells X-ray and EUV diffraction gratings for synchrotron radiation facilities. These state-of-the-art gratings are used for a variety of scientific and commercial applications by many Fortune 500 companies, academic institutions, and government laboratories around the world. Inprentus was founded in June 2012 to commercialize an innovative, nano-scale lithography technology using mechanical deformation of metallic surfaces.