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X-ray Generator Fits In the Palm of Your Hand
ananyo writes "Scientists have reported the first tabletop source of ultra-short, laser-like pulses of low energy, or 'soft,' X-rays. The light, capable of probing the structure and dynamics of molecules (abstract), was previously available only at large, billion-dollar national facilities such as synchrotrons or free-electron lasers, where competition for use of the equipment is fierce. The new device, by husband-and-wife team Margaret Murnane and Henry Kapteyn based at JILA in Boulder, Colorado, might soon lie within the grasp of a university laboratory budget — perhaps allowing them to one day be as common in labs as electron microscopes are."
perhaps allowing them to one day be as common in labs as electron microscopes are.
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And back in my day, electron microscopes were big-ticket gear that only a few big labs could afford.
Now, get off of my lawn!
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Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
What happens when you dial these up a bit? Will we have legislation that bans the use of "cancer guns"?
I see that coming...
cool! now i can give people that piss me off cancer!
I don`t want the generator in the palm of my hand! I want it imbedded in the sunglasses on my head!
Of, course, the DHS/TSA will have dibs on the first batch.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Unlocking the Proteome is the next big challenge beyond the genome. With instruments like this, it will make the task of X-ray crystallography determination of protein structures much easier. It's through the analysis of protein structures that we'll eventually be able to connect the genome to physical traits. The Phenome?
So just how common are electron microscopes these days? I don't work in the sciences so in my head they're still room sized beasts that I read about as a child in the 1980s. I haven't really thought about it until now but I suppose the technology must have improved, like technology does. Are there desktop sized ones now that can be had for relatively low cost?
I worked on the X-Ray lithography stepper at Hampshire Instruments. That was small scale X-ray generation, not a "billon dollar national resource"
So, could this be used for the next step in chip fabrication?
Have gnu, will travel.
This is a very good experiment, but this is far from being competition for the large X-ray facilities. They are generating 10^5 photons in a 1% bandwidth at 1 KeV. The LCLS (X-ray Free Electron Laser at SLAC) generates about 10^13 photons in a ~0.3% bandwidth. (100 million times more) and operates at 6 X the repetition rate. The LCLS can also operate up to 10 KeV with the same pulse energy if needed. Near future facilities like the Euro XFEL will operate at 100X the average power of LCLS.
The very wide bandwidth of the harmonic generation described in the paper is very interesting because it can in principal support very short (few attosecond) bunches for future experiments, however at the moment they seem to be operating with 80 femtosecond bunches (or bunch trains), comparable to the FELs. (LCLS can run as short as a few femtoseconds with 10^12 photons). It is not clear how to compress their very broad band pulses to generate short pulses, though it is in principal possible. The minimum pulse length for FELs is likely to be around 100-200 attoseconds, so the harmonic generation scheme may eventually have a large advantage here.
It really is excellent work and a low power, ultra-short pulse tabletop X-ray source is a very valuable research tool, but I just want to point out that at the moment it is not a substitute for large X-ray facilities.
Josef Frisch
SLAC / LCLS
I had to send it back. It uses way too much tape.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn15016-humble-sticky-tape-emits-powerful-xrays.html
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Pictures please or it didn't happen.
You can do this with Tungsten in a vacuum tube connected to a high-voltage source, all the electronics for that have been able to fit in the palm of your hand since the 60's.
This is a fully coherent laser -- not just an X-ray source. So, you would not be scattering photons the way crystallography is done -- you would be taking holographic photos of the protein molecules.
And yes, these are soft X-rays now -- but this is and brand new technique, and it appears to be very scaleable. Hard X-rays might not be too far off.
Been waiting for those x-ray glasses since I was a kid...
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
I once mentioned shielding to a X-ray laser physicist who was talking about his high energy X-ray laser. "Aren't you worried about shielding?". The reply "O no our X-rays don't go that far in air."
That's when I realized that laser physicists have a slightly different interpretation of high-energy than most radiation physicists. I only consider high energy X-rays those at 100 keV+.
Sort of killing the buzz here but if you read the paper and maybe look at figure 2B you will see why this technique (high-harmonic generation) cannot be extended to be usable at higher keV beam without the laws of physics changing. At the current higher end their efficiency has fell to what 0.01% and falling fast.