Japanese join race to build a hard X-ray laser
NOV 03, 2006
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.020582
Science : X-ray free-electron lasers promise beams that are vastly brighter and with higher energy and shorter pulses than today’s scientific workhorse: synchrotron x-rays. These “hard” x-ray wavelengths—down to 0.1 nanometer—promise to reveal the structure of proteins that have eluded other techniques and nanometer-scale features in materials. Pulses as short as 100 femtoseconds or less will act as strobes to produce movies of molecular bonds breaking and forming in chemical reactions. And astrophysicists will become experimentalists, using beams 10 billion times brighter than synchrotron radiation to create the extreme state of matter believed to exist within forming stars. With U.S. and European machines in the works, Japan wants into the club reports Dennis Normile in Science.
© 2006 American Institute of Physics
