World's First X-Ray Laser Goes Live

smolloy writes "The world's first X-ray laser (LCLS) has seen first light. A Free Electron Laser (FEL) is based on the light that is emitted by accelerated electrons when they are forced to move in a curved path. The beam then interacts with this emitted light in order to excite coherent emission (much like in a regular laser); thus producing a very short, extremely bright, bunch of coherent X-ray photons. The engineering expertise that went into this machine is phenomenal — 'This is the most difficult light source that has ever been turned on,' said LCLS Construction Project Director John Galayda. 'It's on the boundary between the impossible and possible, and within two hours of start-up these guys had it right on.' — and the benefits to the applied sciences from research using this light can be expected to be enormous: 'For some disciplines, this tool will be as important to the future as the microscope has been to the past,' said SLAC Director Persis Drell."

Comments

Re:First?

[DragonWriter]

If they had actually deployed lasers like that one, I think I would have been more afraid of our missile defense than of any missiles.

Considering that our pre-Star Wars anti-bomber defenses included preparing to toss up missiles with nuclear warheads in the midst of bomber formations, often necessarily over populated areas (as with Nike-Hercules), its not like the bomb-pumped lasers to defend against ballistic missiles would have been all that out of line with what preceded them (had they, you know, been practical to deploy.)

Re:Awesome

[Colonel Korn]

I had the pleasure of taking a tour of the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Labs. They have a similar setup; using accelerated electrons to produce x-rays, the real achievement here is the coherency part. I wonder how this effects high speed x-ray crystallography, is it easier to decode the scatter if the light is coherent? Will we be getting real time videos of enzymes in action? If so I can only imagine what that will do for chemical and pharmaceutical research.

Also, I hope this is the first step in a fairly rapid development of a tabletop x-ray laser that can live in a lab. Last time I spent a week doing small angle x-ray scattering at Argonne I had to be in the top 3 of the 48 requests submitted for x-ray time on the beamline I wanted in order to get an invitation. The other 45 groups got rejected. X-ray time is a limiting factor in a very large number of scientific fields.

Not that I don't appreciate coherency.

I think you are confused.

[smaddox]

Everyone seems to be confused about what an x-ray laser is. It isn't like a laser pointer that can be focused down to a small dot. X-ray's can't readily be focused, except by clever uses of beryllium, and even those aren't very efficient.

No, the applications of this are quite different. Think about an expanded laser beam. What can you do with that? Well, you can make holograms, for one. An interesting thing about holograms is that the size of the image scales with the light that illuminates them. So, if you could record a hologram in X-rays, then view it with red light, it would be magnified by ~700 times. Unfortunately, x-ray holograms are unlikely, because recording a hologram requires redirecting the beam at least once. The best X-ray mirrors (beryllium) are no more than 1% efficient.

So X-ray lasers aren't really that interesting for the layman. However, they are extremely important for science. I don't know specifically what this one will be used for, but you can bet it will lead to new discoveries.