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 (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/(cm${}^2$ s keV).