Astrophysics Brand Guidelines: François Zayek’s California X-Ray Scanner Maker, Since 2002

An X-ray engineer’s own company.

Astrophysics Inc. is a Southern California maker of X-ray security scanners, founded in 2002 by François Zayek, an engineer whom the company describes as having spent his whole career in X-ray technology. The Los Angeles Business Journal reported in April 2014 that Zayek, the majority owner, began his career in 1987 as a researcher at Bio-Imaging Research and founded Xaytek, an X-ray imaging research and consulting firm, before establishing Astrophysics.

The name has a history of its own. The company says Zayek was vice president of engineering at PerkinElmer and vice president of engineering and research at EG&G Astrophysics, which it calls “the original Astrophysics namesake,” and that in those roles he worked on CT technology for the US Federal Aviation Administration and Transportation Security Administration. It says he founded the new company after seeing a technology gap in X-ray security, and that he set up Xaytek in 2000.

The firm has stayed close to its founder. The Business Journal described it in 2014 as closely held by Zayek and quoted its vice president of finance as saying this let it focus on long-term growth rather than quarterly results; the company’s website in 2026 still lists him as founder and chief executive. In 2014 the paper placed its headquarters in the City of Industry, east of Los Angeles, and reported that a 45,000-square-foot manufacturing facility had opened in Ontario, California, the year before. Today the company says its headquarters is “just outside Los Angeles” and that its main research site, the Astrophysics Research Center, is in Ontario.

From checkpoint tunnels to traffic lanes.

Astrophysics makes one kind of thing: X-ray scanners, from compact units for checkpoints and mailrooms to systems for pallets, freight and vehicles. Its website groups them by market — critical infrastructure, aviation, and ports and borders — and by use, from checkpoint and hold baggage to mail and small parcels, cargo, and mobile, vehicle and freight screening. Its checkpoint and cargo machines carry the XIS name, while vehicle and freight systems carry names such as HXC-LaneScan and HXP-FreightScan.

Cargo pushed the company toward three dimensions. In February 2019 it announced the Multi-View CT, a pallet scanner that it says combines X-ray images taken from several angles with 3D computed tomography, using a 450kV generator; on its about page it calls the system the first 3D CT cargo scanner. In October 2021 it announced that US Customs and Border Protection had awarded it an indefinite-delivery contract for low-energy portals to inspect privately owned vehicles at border crossings, with the HXC-LaneScan, a portal it describes as fitting inside a standard traffic lane, due for first deployment in 2022. Earlier, in August 2017, it said it had shown its HXC-320 vehicle scanner to a visiting member of Congress at its Ontario facility.

The company makes several “first” claims for itself: it says it was the first to develop “6-Color Imaging,” real-time diagnostics and remote diagnostics. Those are its own claims. It says its systems are “designed in the USA,” and its 2021 border-portal release describes the HXC-LaneScan as designed and assembled in California. The Business Journal reported in 2014 that its products ranged in size from checkpoint units to machines as large as a cargo container, and that its engineering effort centred on the algorithms that turn detector signals into readable images.

Design and documentation.

Security screening and identity hardware is mostly seen in passing: the X-ray tunnel at an airport checkpoint, the arch a traveller walks through, the grey trays that slide back along a roller track. The companies that make this equipment sell to airports, customs services, border agencies, banks and governments rather than to the public, and their brands are built for procurement teams, regulators and trade-fair visitors.

Their imagery follows the equipment. Websites and brochures show security lanes with scanner tunnels and conveyor belts, walk-through metal detectors, cargo portals and gantries that a lorry drives through, and the operator screens on which bags appear as layered X-ray images. Identity makers work at a different scale: card printers small enough for an office desk, and the production lines on which passports, bank cards and ID cards are made and personalised.

Much of the business is about approvals and contracts. Makers name the regulators whose lists or standards their machines appear on, such as the US Transportation Security Administration or the European Civil Aviation Conference, and announce orders airport by airport and agency by agency. New products are shown at trade fairs such as Passenger Terminal Expo for airport equipment and Security Essen in Germany, where screening, access-control and identity companies exhibit side by side.

Ownership in this field changes often. Some of the makers in this guide were built from acquisitions or sit inside larger listed groups, and some have changed hands recently: Smiths Detection passed from Smiths Group to CVC Capital Partners in June 2026. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and where it says its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Tomorrow’s technology, made in California.

The company has grown steadily by its own count. The Los Angeles Business Journal reported a head count of 120 in April 2014, and said two distributors working with more than 80 agencies shipped its products to more than 100 countries, with international sales making up most of the business. By 2017 the company said it employed more than 250 people in Southern California; in 2020 it put its deployed systems at more than 35,000 in over 150 countries, and its homepage now gives more than 45,000 in more than 180 countries. Those are company figures. It lists offices in Texas and Washington, D.C., and abroad in Mexico, the United Kingdom, Lebanon, India and the Philippines.

Exporting sits at the centre of how it presents itself. The company says it received the US Department of Commerce’s Presidential “E” Award for exporting for 2020, formally presented in Washington on 5 November 2021. Its slogan is “Tomorrow’s Technology for Today’s Security,” and its homepage leans on the lines “American Innovation” and “American-Made. World-Proven.” It also says it holds ISO 9001:2015 and ISO 14001:2015 certification. The 2014 Business Journal article framed it as a small company taking on much larger rivals, naming OSI Systems and Smiths Detection.

Its website is organised around three markets — critical infrastructure, aviation, and ports and borders — and its news pages mix contract announcements with guides on choosing and maintaining X-ray scanners.

For a design guide, Astrophysics shows how a founder-led engineering firm builds an identity from American manufacturing and export claims; compare Rapiscan Systems and Analogic, two other American makers of screening equipment. For this guide we use a night indigo, a warm amber and a cool grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Astrophysics’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.