A double-protractor system UCLA late 1987 S/N 001 and S/N 016

Motor driven two theta table U Texas Austin 1988 in Marvin Hackert’s lab

Six freshly-built ADSC multiwire detectors in our shop in 1990

From 1984 to 1992 ADSC built and installed 83 multiwire detectors

Ron Burns--a worthy competitor-- developed the Xentronics detector 1986 Photograph Provided by Sue Byram

Concept drawing of Xentronics detector filled with Xe / CO2 @4 atm Strong, Spherical Beryllium window

Typical solid, Xentronics detector

But … what was needed was a detector with even better spatial resolution and even bigger solid angle coverage

Image plate detectors began to be commercially available. Such a detector had been under intense development in Japan and then in Germany Image plate detectors began to be commercially available.

One of the first Image Plate Systems c. 1991

MAR 180 with cover removed

Concept drawing for image plate detector Photomultiplier tube Fluorescent radiation Helium Neon laser beam

Image Plate Detectors brute force solid angle coverage

In 1991 ADSC contracted to distribute the MAR Research Image plate scanner systems in the US and Canada From 1992 until 1996 ADSC installed about 30 MAR Research Image plate systems.

1992-1996 Image plate detectors quickly came to dominate in home labs and especially at synchrotron beam lines because Not only did they have very large solid angle coverage but they were integrating “film-like” detectors so they were not count rate limited like diffractometers and multiwire counters and were particularly well suited to the higher intensity diffraction at synchrotrons.

But the 1 to 3 minute readout time of image plate detectors was still too slow to get the best use of a synchrotron beam line. What was really needed at synchrotrons was a detector with much faster readout time.

In 1994 Encouraged by the pioneering work of Sol Gruner, Walter Phillips and Ed Westbrook ADSC started work on commercial CCD-based X-ray detectors.

Basic Principle of Operation (3.7:1 TAPER RATIO) 8 1Å 24 450

Fiberoptic Tapers

Single Fiberoptic taper cut square for use in an array 105 mm

Quantum 1 cover removed

An ADSC Quantum 1 detector

Readout time of our Quantum 1 CCD detectors was only 9 seconds Readout time of our Quantum 1 CCD detectors was only 9 seconds. Fast compared to the minutes it typically took image plate detectors to read out.

Manufactured and delivered 16 Quantum 1 detectors between 1993 and 1995 Most were packaged into small molecule systems by Rigaku and sold in Japan

But for protein data collection at synchrotrons we really needed a CCD detector with bigger area

Quantum 4 CCD Array Detector

Quantum 4 photo

Quantum 4 demonstration at X12B, June 1997

Diffraction photo from this demo at Brookhaven beamline X12B Glutamine Synthetase from David Eisenberg’s Lab at UCLA

31 Quantum 4 detectors delivered 1996-2001