NIST Industrial ImpactCompany: X-Ray Optical Systems, Inc., Albany, New York Scientific progress often involves establishing conventional wisdom. Other times, it is more a matter of defying it. Many scientists believed, for example, that the laws of physics would prevent the precise focusing of high-energy X-rays, a useful but hard-to-control form of radiation. They were wrong, as demonstrated by a small New York company that, with the help of co-funding from NIST’s Advanced Technology Program (ATP), successfully manipulated the radiation and contradicted a long-standing scientific assumption. X-Ray Optical Systems, Inc., used the ATP funding to develop processes to fabricate and predict the performance of new “capillary optics” technology, which can bend and focus both X-rays and neutrons. Follow-on efforts to develop medical, industrial, and scientific applications are beginning to pay off for both the company and the nation. For example:
And this is only the beginning.“We have more active collaborations than we have employees, and we have identified more application areas than we have employees ... it’s an exciting time,” says David Gibson, the company president. This level of activity represents quite a change from the humble origins of X-Ray Optical Systems, formed in 1990 with a staff of three and little capital. At the time, the company’s primary resource was the concept of a Russian physicist at the I.V. Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy in Moscow (a collaborator of Gibson’s father at the State University of New York at Albany) for reflecting X-rays and neutrons through bundles of tiny glass capillaries that were curved to direct the radiation in parallel beams or spots, much like fiber-optic cables direct light. The radiation reflects off the very smooth interior of the capillaries, which are bunched together by the tens of thousands. Prototype lenses had been built, but the technology had to be extended to useful wavelengths and be made reliable and cost effective if it was ever to be commercially viable. In the three-year ATP project, which ended in 1995, X-Ray Optical Systems developed software and algorithms that enable the company to simulate the performance of the optics for any energy range and application. Without this capability, the system-design process would be too costly for commercial use, Gibson says. Also under the ATP project, Gibson’s team developed the process and equipment for fabricating and measuring the capillaries; evaluated a variety of glass materials to understand the trade-offs and optimize system performance; and investigated and minimized the small amount of radiation leakage so the system would be declared safe. The ATP thus enabled X-Ray Optical Systems to become more than a research operation, extending the benefits of the new technology outside the laboratory, Gibson says. He also credits the program with helping the company win two industry awards (R&D 100 from R&D Magazine in 1995 and the Photonics Circle of Excellence from Photonics Spectra in 1996) and lay the technical groundwork for numerous follow-on collaborations. Using know-how acquired in the ATP work, the company worked with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the State University of New York at Albany to develop an instrument that, according to NASA, generates the world’s most intense commercial source of X-rays. The instrument is being used to analyze large, near-perfect protein crystals grown in the weightless environment of space for purposes such as drug design. “This new capillary X-ray technology will allow us to pursue more challenging research problems in our own laboratory with a speed and effectiveness never before possible,” says Daniel Carter, who has since left NASA to form a start-up company, New Century Pharmaceuticals, in Alabama.“These and future applications should have a profound impact on many areas of science and medicine.” Recently, NASA announced that Carter had determined the structure of an engineered antibody (a protein) that neutralizes a rare, life-threatening virus that causes pneumonia in infants and young children. This achievement is expected to help scientists understand how the virus and the antibody interact, an important step toward the development of a treatment. The new technology can be adapted to focus either X-rays or neutrons, depending on the application. Optics for manufacturing and analytical instruments generally use X-rays, which, because of very short wavelengths, can make images with very high resolution. Neutrons are typically used by materials researchers (including those at NIST, which cooperated with the company in a separate project on neutron lenses). In general, Gibson says, the intensity of the radiation enables a user to achieve either vastly increased speed of operation or greatly enhanced resolution and measurements, or some trade-off between the two. In one industrial application, IBM Corporation is using the new optics to develop and monitor thin-film materials used in magnetic data-storage devices. The new X-ray technology is expected to help enhance product quality. “Without this technology, cost-effective analysis of the stress, texture, and microstructure of these films would not be possible,” says Brian York, a research physicist in IBM’s Materials Laboratory in San Jose, California. Among applications still under development, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is funding research on X-ray lithography, which could greatly shrink the feature size of computer chips. In addition, the National Institutes of Health is supporting academic research on mammography. In early testing, the new optics appear to produce exceptional image clarity, potentially making it easier to spot tumors, says Wally Peppler, a professor of medical physics at the University of Wisconsin. “When we first heard about [the approach], we thought it couldn’t possibly be done,” says Peppler, the principal investigator on the project. “But it turns out to be much more logical than we thought. So it’s revolutionary in that way.” February 1999 |