The long term goals are the design, construction, and operation of a 100 MeV electron storage ring and a high peak power C02 laser which collides with the electrons to generate directed X-rays. This """"""""Compton Backscatter"""""""" source of X-rays can be tuned by changing the electron beam energy. The cost of such a facility is expected to be less than $2M if a way can be found to do pulse compression of the continuous C02 laser. There is also a need to demonstrate that low cost magnets can be built so that the storage ring cost is kept below $0.5M. It is fairly clear that the San Diego area needs such a facility because of the large number of protein crystallography groups in the area. It is also natural for UCSD to be the center for this activity, especially as it could be the evolution of the Research Resource operated by Prof. Xuong. Finally, the evaluation of the feasibility of the facility can be done as small projects which provide undergraduates and young graduate students with entry-level research opportunities. The UCSD campus is just completing a new research building which will provide a place and some other support for facilities such as this. This proposal addresses the need for evaluating two specific questions: (1) Can a way be found to make an inexpensive continuous C02 laser (10.4 micron wavelength) with peak power of greater than 1 MW? (2) Can it be shown that there are no major problems associated with fabricating cheap, small bending magnets from NdFeB permanent magnet material? If these questions are answered in the affirmative, there should be no major obstacles on the road to making the prototype X-ray facility.
