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

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

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

4. From 1984 to 1992 ADSC built and installed 83 multiwire detectors

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

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

7. Typical solid, Xentronics detector

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

9. 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.

10. One of the first Image Plate Systems c. 1991

11. MAR 180 with cover removed

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

13. Image Plate Detectors brute force solid angle coverage

14. 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.

15.
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.

16. 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.

17. 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.

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

19. Fiberoptic Tapers

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

21. Quantum 1 cover removed

22. An ADSC Quantum 1 detector

23. 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.

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

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

26. Quantum 4 CCD Array Detector

27. Quantum 4 photo

28. Quantum 4 demonstration at X12B, June 1997

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

30. 31 Quantum 4 detectors delivered 1996-2001