Compact x-ray laser would shrink billion-dollar machines to the size of a room

When the first x-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) opened in 2009 at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, it provided a new way to look at the atomic-scale world, revealing details about biochemical processes such as photosynthesis and exotic materials such as superconductors. But since then, only four other such billion-dollar facilities have been built worldwide, and getting time on them is difficult. A group of researchers at Arizona State University (ASU), Tempe, now plans to build a new kind of free-electron laser, dramatically smaller and cheaper than anything that has come before. This month, ASU announced it would embark on the $170 million Compact X-ray Free Electron Laser (CXFEL) project after it received a $91 million grant from the National Science Foundation. The design could put the machines within reach of university laboratories and expand their accessibility. “It’s an elegant idea,” says Claudio Pellegrini, a physicist at SLAC who first proposed its XFEL in 1992. “Everybody would like to make a smaller system.” XFELs are excellent probes of the atomic world because short-wavelength x-rays can resolve details that would be invisible to longer wavelength light. Moreover, the short, femtosecond x-ray pulses work like a high-speed camera, helping researchers capture ultrafast processes such as the movement of electrons and atoms. To reach such supreme spatial and temporal resolution, a standard XFEL requires...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news