Development status of the LAUE project

We present the status of LAUE, a project supported by the Italian Space Agency (ASI), and devoted to develop Laue lenses with long focal length (from 10-15 meters up to 100 meters), for hard X-/soft gamma-ray astronomy (80-600 keV). Thanks to their focusing capability, the design goal is to improve the sensitivity of the current instrumention in the above energy band by 2 orders of magnitude, down to a few times 10-8 photons/(cm2 s keV). © 2012 SPIE.