* Lyncean products are no longer available.
The Lyncean Compact Light Source (CLS) is a breakthrough technology that addresses the increasing demand for access to high quality X-rays by offering the possibility of a synchrotron beamline for home laboratory applications. The Lyncean CLS X-ray beam shares some favorable features of synchrotron light – a continuously tunable energy spectrum and high spatial coherence – combined with some unique attributes such as intrinsically narrow bandwidth (few %) and a moderate (few milliradian) diverging cone beam. The highly peaked spectrum provides an extremely low-noise background compared to both conventional sources and many synchrotron beamlines.
The cone beam divergence is small enough to be efficiently focused with x-ray optics yet large enough to provide a nearly uniform area beam by letting the native beam drift several meters. The Lyncean CLS X-rays provide powerful probes to reveal a range of physical structure down to the atomic scale. The Lyncean CLS is useful across many disciplines of X-ray science, including materials, nanotechnology, structural biology, medical sciences, semiconductor metrology, pharmaceutical development, and other chemical and physical sciences. The Lyncean CLS provides scientists with access to local, on-demand synchrotron light, allowing for an unprecedented new level of productivity.
The Lyncean CLS miniature synchrotron source allows for energy and scale reduction by a factor of 200
The Lyncean CLS development builds on the U.S. investment in large synchrotrons, but with a new technology that allows the source to be very compact. Conventional synchrotron light sources employ multi-GeV electron beams that are stored in large rings of magnets to generate intense, bright, 1 Å wavelength radiation. The Lyncean CLS employs an electron beam and a high power “laser undulator” to accomplish the same effect. The shift from cm scale periodic magnets used in a typical synchrotron light source, to sub-micron period laser pulse used in the Lyncean CLS, allows a reduction of energy and scale by a factor 200 – a stadium size machine becomes a room size machine!
Enabling the future of laboratory X-ray experimentation
X-ray scientists at synchrotron laboratories around the world have developed a vast array of applications over several decades, many of which cannot be exploited using conventional sources, but can be performed by the Lyncean CLS. By opening access to these powerful x-ray applications, the Lyncean CLS enables new avenues of discovery to a broad range of researchers.