Focus of the New Florida Synchrotron, A Source For Industries
If Florida builds its new synchrotron (The Beach), it shouldn’t try to copy the existing playbook. The real opportunity is in commercial tomography: high-throughput 3D imaging that industries already need, but can’t access at scale. Every modern ring can do great science; very few have figured out how to turn their tomography beamlines into genuine engines for economic output. The Beach (Brightest Ever ACHromat) synchrotron can skip the slow part and build directly for commercial value, predictable throughput, pay-to-play automated workflows, and industry-ready products.
Right now, battery companies, aerospace groups, chip fabs and materials labs are all bottlenecked by CT capacity. Florida has a future untapped space industry that will need tomography and radiation-tested equipment. Industrial CT scanners can’t match the speed or resolution of a synchrotron and definitely not a one geared for the needs of the community with whole sectors dedicated to different Tomography regimes (macro, micro, nano, 3D, 4D, time-resolved and laminography). But almost no facility offers an access model designed for industry. Beamtime allocation is still structured for fairness, not throughput or return on investment (ROI). That’s the gap: if The Beach positions tomography as a service, with automated real-time reconstruction, it a public-private partnership win-win.
A new ring in Florida’s tech corridor has many strategic advantages, the greatest of which is that it isn’t burdened by legacy. It can build an allocation system aligned with product development, not just paper proposals. It can integrate robotics, AI reconstruction, and industrial data formats from day one. And it can court the growing wave of commercial tomography companies (Lumafield, Sigray, Glimpse, Zeiss Xradia) looking for partnerships. If Florida wants a synchrotron that actually drives regional innovation, tomography is the clearest, most investable way to get there a bridge between science and a source for industries that need it. The Beach should be built for the next 50 years of industry, not the last 50 years of academia.
