SIGRAY, INC. — Department of Energy SBIR Phase II: 05a

Description

Synchrotron x-ray radiation has become an integral tool used by scientists across a diverse range of academic and industrial disciplines, ranging from the development of new drugs and environmental or agricultural studies, to cutting-edge research on semiconductor and advanced materials. Recent advances across multiple fields toward nanometer-scale studies has resulted in tremendous demand among the burgeoning synchrotron community for increased access to smaller microbeams down to 100 nanometer or even 10 nanometers. This proposal aims to address the major concerns highlighted at a recent Department of Energy sponsored workshop, in which leaders of the synchrotron community identified manufacturing and technological limitations of current approaches to x-ray optics as the major bottleneck to advancing research performed at the synchrotron and free electron laser facilities. The objective of the project is to develop capillary mirror lenses that not only achieve high sub-100 nm resolution, but also enables major advantages over current x-ray focusing approaches (e.g. KB mirrors, zone plates, CRLs, and MLLs) in important properties such as x-ray flux and energy range. The mirror lenses not only provide more efficient use of the limited synchrotron beamtime and new class of in-situ/operando science, but also impact future beamline development and upgrades with a more cost-effective solution. Phase II built upon the developmental work of Phase I in major strides in both the mirror lens shaping system and optical metrology system used for the fabrication of capillary mirror lenses. This culminated in the first-ever submicron resolution capillary mirror lens, which was demonstrated to achieve down to 250 nm (far below submicron) spatial resolution with collaborators at the Advanced Light Source. Utilization of the capillary mirror lens at the ALS with achromatic and longer working distance characteristics is allowing user-friendly operation of the nanoARPES experimental station with over 100X focused x-ray flux than zone plate. In addition, the improvements led to the successful fabrication of many capillary mirror lenses for a wide range of research applications that require focusing of a range of x-ray energies, ranging from angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) at 50 eV for ALS and high energy x-ray diffraction at 65 keV at NSLS II, including experimental demonstration of 600nm focus at NSLS II with 12 keV x-rays. Phase IIA will address the major challenges and findings discovered in Phase II and include: 1) improvements to the temperature stability of the shaping system, 2) major increase in the measurement precision and accuracy of the existing metrology system by 2X using higher resolution objectives and upgraded metrology cameras, and 3) development of a dedicated metrology system with slope measurement precision of 1 µrad. Commercial Applications and Other Benefits: As a result of Phase II, Sigray has already received over $1M in purchase orders from synchrotron customers across the world, including multiple synchrotron sources located in the USA, France, Germany, China, Japan, Thailand, and Taiwan. The rapid commercial success points to the significant pent-up need by the synchrotron community. Use of the capillary mirror lenses will accelerate and empower the scientific work performed with x-ray microbeam techniques that impact our knowledge and life quality, by providing substantially higher flux over current optics approaches and thus reducing data acquisition times for more efficient use of limited synchrotron beam time. It will furthermore enable cost-effective developments of and upgrades to beamlines, thereby facilitating widespread access of high resolution x-ray microbeam techniques to a broader base of researchers.