The laser, called the Linac Coherent Light Source, takes up a third of the two-mile-long linear accelerator at the SLAC National Accelerator Lab in Menlo Park, California. In the accelerator hall, tight bunches of electrons wriggle through a series of magnets and give off X-rays billions of times brighter than earlier X-ray sources could muster. The wavelength of these X-rays is comparable to the radius of a hydrogen atom — about one angstrom, or one ten-billionth of a meter — and each pulse can be as short as a few quadrillionths of a second.
“Understanding how intense light, and in particular intense X-rays, interact with both atoms and molecules is critical to understanding how we’re going to be able to image systems using these intense light pulses in the future,” said laser physicist Roger Falcone of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a member of an advisory committee for the laser’s science team but was not involved in the new studies. More>
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