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FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE FUNDING OPPORTUNITY ANNOUNCEMENT Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR
NOTE: The Solicitations and topics listed on this site are copies from the various SBIR agency solicitations and are not necessarily the latest and most up-to-date. For this reason, you should use the agency link listed below which will take you directly to the appropriate agency server where you can read the official version of this solicitation and download the appropriate forms and rules.
The official link for this solicitation is: http:--science.doe.gov-grants-pdf-SC_FOA_0000969.pdf
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The Office of Basic Energy Sciences, within the DOEs Office of Science, is responsible for current and future synchrotron radiation light sources, free electron lasers, and spallation neutron source user facilities. This topic seeks the development of X-ray optics devices to support the light source user facilities.
Gratings are essential components of synchrotron radiation beamline systems and are used in both monochromators and spectrographs covering the photon energy range up to ~ 3 keV. While traditional ruling machines and holographic recording can provide many of the characteristics required, new lithographic methods based on direct optical writing have the potential to revolutionize grating production. In these methods, a sub-micron light spot or array of spots is produced, and a pattern is written in photoresist on a substrate by scanning the sample on an interferometrically controlled stage. This technique offers arbitrary pattern generation combined with very high throughput. Although some of these techniques are used in mature technologies such as integrated circuit and packaging manufacture, x-ray gratings have some unique challenges such as the use of very thick silicon or metallic substrates and a requirement for high precision control of the groove phase coherence over the full grating surface. We are therefore seeking proposals that aim to demonstrate these new direct write grating patterning techniques and show that the methodology will lead to the commercial marketplace in soft x-ray grating production.
Mirrors are an essential component of all synchrotron and Free Electron Laser (FEL) x-ray beamlines. Current and future projected advances in x-ray source performance have led to an enormous increase in source brightness that is in turn driving mirror figure and finish tolerances to significantly lower values than achievable today. The ability of a manufacturer to make a mirror is fundamentally limited by the in-process metrology that is used to measure the mirror slope and height profiles. We are therefore seeking proposals that aim to substantially improve the precision of manufacture of x-ray mirrors through integration of advanced surface metrology into the manufacturing process. Synchrotron and FEL mirrors are typically characterized by lengths up to 1.2 m, with flat, spherical (5 100 m typical radii), sagittal cylinders ( 5-10 cm sagittal radii) or elliptical shape (typically up to 300 mm long with a factor of 2 change in curvature between the ends). We are therefore seeking proposals that demonstrate new technologies in manufacture and metrology of these classes of mirrors that reduce surface slope and height errors to a range well below 100 nrad and 2 nm (rms) respectively.
In addition to the specific subtopics listed above, the Department invites grant applications in other areas that fall within the scope of the topic description above.