  Laue lenses are an emerging technology that will enhance gamma-ray telescope
sensitivity by one to two orders of magnitude in selected energy bands of the
\sim 100 keV to \sim 1.5 MeV range. This optic would be particularly well
adapted to the observation of faint gamma ray lines, as required for the study
of Supernovae and Galactic positron annihilation. It could also prove very
useful for the study of hard X-ray tails from a variety of compact objects,
especially making a difference by providing sufficient sensitivity for
polarization to be measured by the focal plane detector. Our group has been
addressing the two key issues relevant to improve performance with respect to
the first generation of Laue lens prototypes: obtaining large numbers of
efficient crystals and developing a method to fix them with accurate
orientation and dense packing factor onto a substrate. We present preliminary
results of an on-going study aiming to enable a large number of crystals
suitable for diffraction at energies above 500 keV. In addition, we show the
first results of the Laue lens prototype assembled using our beamline at SSL/UC
Berkeley, which demonstrates our ability to orient and glue crystals with
accuracy of a few arcsec, as required for an efficient Laue lens telescope.
