Research themes:
Concept
Motivated largely by the need to understand materials under the form of nano-objects, or to understand fundametal
process in life sciences or even to master and foreseen the behavior of the Earth and of the enviroment parameters,
european scientists are requesting access to more and more performant tools. Along this line, there is an urge for high
quality light sources, operating in the infrared (IR) (far-IR, mid-IR and near-IR), soft X-rays and hard X-rays wavelengths
to unravel these matters. For this reason, Europe has invested large efforts to have state-of-the-art synchrotron facilities
and free electron laser facilities. These large scale facilities have already contributed in a significant way to the scientific output,
and are high quality user-facilities.
However one big caveat of these facilities is that beamlines are run under a user-facility program, with a rather high turn-over,
and non-standard experiments are less easy to perform there or they are merely impossible. Experiments with in-situ coupling to
large existing material production units for nanoscience and technology, experiments related to university hospitals (radiation therapy, scanners, …),
pharmacological factories (drug design, molecular design, confidential protein diffraction, …), experiments related to urgent analyses (harvests quality,
building material quality, authenticity of art work, …) lie beyond the possibilities of the guest programs of the user facilities.
For this reason and in order to bridge the phenomenal gap between traditional laboratory sources and the large scale user facilities, scientists have
been looking for compact light sources enabling to generate light of high enough quality to perform a number of important experiments on a local “laboratory”
scale. Clearly, a compact light source performances are not going to be up to the quality that large synchrotrons can deliver.
The Mirrorcle© prototype, which will the basis of this LABSYNC proposal, fills the gap between the large scale equipments, and the existing laboratory
sources, and this being tunable within a very wide range of frequencies. The successful Mirrorcle© system is designed and constructed in Japan, and the 20 MeV
prototype just became operational at the Ritsumeikan University. The collaboration between the Japanese inventor and the European LABSYNC participants will
involve design features and characterization of the Japanese prototype. Several prototype beam lines will be designed by the European partners, with the aim to
obtain state-of-the-art infrared experimental setups, soft X-ray experimental setups as well as hard-X-ray experimental setups in a wide range of fundamental, applied
and medical sciences. When the results of the design study are positive (accelerator performing well, FIR power and X-ray brilliance reaching the desired
specifications), the design will be realized at the KULeuven partner institute with other means of financing. One of the particularities of the compact Mirrorcle©
device is that the beam lines can be combined with each other; meaning that FIR, Soft X-ray and Hard X-rays can be directed to one single point of interest (for
instance during the in-situ growth of a CVD grown thin film, focussed at one given position, and enabling to study the time dependent growth analysis of the CVD
process at the film surface, or for instance in irradiating cancer tumors and simultaneously measuring the FIR-FT spectrum to trace the effect of the irradiation).
This is a novel approach, and will be one of the objectives of the design study.
Besides this, there is the possibility to scale down in size/energy the existing Mirrorcle© systems, to very compact, mobile and high performance systems.
In this case the design details will be different, but the main idea behind the concept stays valid. Needless to say that a mobile compact light source has many
potentiat uses (non destructive testing if buildings, medical imaging, etc …)
