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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."
Can it give me super powers if it accidentally hits me?!
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.
Right now X-Ray sources are quite random and waste _a lot_ of energy. A nice pencil thin directional beam would do wonders for CT scanners.
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Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Strangest acronym evar.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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.)
So when will it be small enough to fit on a shark's head?
Can I suggest that they put this thing in the belly of an airforce drone and attempt to cook a tub of popcorn on the ground? Perhaps in my professor's house?
Can it be used for more accurate photolithography?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
How long until Sony announces their new 'Exray' drive, the successor to Bluray--capable of holding 60 petabytes on a single disk? :P
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
The first x-ray laser was part of SDI research in the early 80's. Click here and here for more info.
To be fair, the Nike-Hercules missiles were among the last nuclear defenses intended to be employed. The first was to knock out air bases with nuclear strikes to prevent bombers from getting in the air in the first place. After that came air interception using missiles such as the AIR-2 Genie. Nuclear-tipped SAMs would attempt to intercept over the ocean or unpopulated territory where possible (the Nike-Hercules had a range of over 75 miles), and explode over populated territories only if nothing else worked.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Not the first. Maybe the first X-ray FEL (maybe) but not the first X-ray laser proper. The first X-ray lasers were created in nickel and samarium plasmas created by few ns long, multi Kj, UV light pulses of LLNL's Novette laser (predecessor of the Nova laser) in the early '80s. The work was probably done with SDI in mind.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
And because it's ridiculously impractical?
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Oh, I don't know; I'm pretty sure he did. You see, the whole idea of SDI was to start something very expensive that Just Might Work. That meant that the Soviets had to try to copy us, and the effort caused their rickety, barely-functional economy to collapse, bringing down the whole Soviet Union with it. And that, my friend, was the whole point of the exercise: fight the Cold War on economic grounds, where we could easily out do them rather than on military grounds where we were stuck in a stalemate.
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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.
Watch out, dont visit the above! It's a trap!
It will fsck you up. Unless you're running linux - then it's just really annoying.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
Ronnie promised us that SDI would make nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete". I think he didn't quite understand how hard that is.
Oh, I don't know; I'm pretty sure he did. You see, the whole idea of SDI was to start something very expensive that Just Might Work. That meant that the Soviets had to try to copy us, and the effort caused their rickety, barely-functional economy to collapse, bringing down the whole Soviet Union with it. .
Riiight. And that's exactly what Ronnie was thinking about when he shoveled all that money to SDI. "Let's do this because we know the Russians can't possibly keep up and it will bankrupt them!"
I know you're trying to be sarcastic, but you're exactly right. How do I know? Well, I happen to know the chairman of the citizen's advisory committee that worked out the idea, and the man who's house was used for the meetings.
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Well, storage rings can produce radiation with a large coherence volume (i.e. cut out the part you can use), such as at the cSAXS beamline at the SLS. What's unique about these lasers is the ultrashort, huge emission at dependable timing that they can deliver.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
There are problems with this idea.
(1) Its justification after the fact. No credible proof has been provided that this was ever the plan: rather, the Soviet Union collapsed economically,
in a way unexpected by the CIA and the intelligence community, then the SDI folks say "See ? that was our Sekrit plan all along". If it was the
plan, it shouldn't have been a suprise.
(2) SDI didn't change soviet spending. They did practically no SDI work (in comparison to the US), and Soviet military spending didn't change.
Counter-measures to SDI are / were far cheaper than SDI itself: SDI meant spending billions on new tracking and laser developments to appear
credible (even if no-one involved believed it would work); countering it meant a few dummy balloons and chaff. It risked bankrupting the US
far before bankrupting the SU.
(3) Not only did Soviet spending not change, the CIA knew that it didn't change, and yet SDI continued. A very expensive, failed, policy was continued
in order to keep money flowing into certain companies. It was a pork barrel.
The soviet economic collapse was triggered by OPEC, not SDI. When Saudi Arabia et al opened stopcocks and flooded the world with cheap oil,
the Soviet export economy collapsed.
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist
I wounder if it could be used to make a multi tera holographic x-ray storage device...
Numerous places have X Ray "lasers" including SLAC. These aren't true lasers since the mechanism that generates the coherent pulse of light doesn't do so via stimulated emission (where a cascade of photons generated by electrons dropping to a lower potential result in a pulse or beam of extremely coherent light, same phase, direction, etc). Packets of electronics are pushed at near light speeds through magnetic fields that bend or wiggle the packet, generating a pulse of very coherent light (bending the path of an electron causes a photon to be emitted) that compares well in coherence to laser generated light. What appears to be new is that the frequency of X Rays is in the upper limits of the X Ray spectrum. The higher frequency will be useful for even finer details of molecular reactions, internal cell processes, and other remarkable research that is being done with these light sources.
I herd you like light so we put a beam in your beam...
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