Inprentus Awarded a High Value Contract to Supply the European X-ray Free Electron Laser with a Diffraction Grating for Real-time Beam Diagnostics

Inprentus will supply a custom designed blazed diffraction grating to be installed at the SQS (Small Quantum Systems) soft X-ray instrument at the EuXFEL. This instrument is dedicated to investigations of fundamental processes in atoms, molecules, and clusters irradiated with intense ultrashort X-ray pulses.

A contract has been awarded to Inprentus for the custom manufacture of an elliptical diffraction grating with variable line spacing. This unique diffraction grating will be part of the diagnostics instrumentation on the SQS soft X-ray instrument at the 3.4 km long European XFEL located in the German states of Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein.

The European XFEL is the world’s largest X-ray laser. It is opening up completely new research opportunities for scientists and industrial users. Typical scientific research targets at the SQS (one of currently six instrument stations at EuXFEL) include atoms, molecules, ions, nanoparticles, and biomolecules. The main applications focus on processes occurring under irradiation with ultra-short, highly intense X-ray pulses using a variety of spectroscopic techniques.

“This is the second time Inprentus has been chosen to supply European XFEL with an ultra-high precision custom diffraction grating,” said Ron van Os, CEO of Inprentus. “Working with EuXFEL on the complex design of this unique beam diagnostic diffraction grating has again proven our ability to provide the world’s advanced materials research light sources with high quality components for their X-ray optics instrumentation.”

Inprentus Inc. 
Inprentus designs, manufactures, and sells X-ray and EUV diffraction gratings for synchrotron and free electron laser facilities. Inprentus’ gratings are used for a variety of scientific and commercial applications by many Fortune 500 companies, academic institutions, and government laboratories around the world. The company was founded in 2012 to commercialize an innovative, nano-scale scribing technology. This technology is a general-purpose approach to high-precision patterning of surfaces and is particularly suited to X-ray and EUV diffractive optics in which features must be shaped with 0.1 degree angular precision and positioned with nanometer precision over distances of tens of centimeters.

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