Motivation
With the advent of
high-resolution (l/Dl ~ 1000) x-ray spectroscopy
in the last several years, a wealth of spectroscopic data for
photoionized sources has been generated, and the level of
detail and accuracy demanded of models has increased
dramatically.
By producing and measuring a
well-characterized x-ray photoionized plasma in the laboratory,
we hope to benchmark the codes used to model x-ray spectra of
active galactic nuclei, x-ray binaries, and other astrophysical sources
for which photoionization dominates collisional ionization.