World's most powerful x-ray laser did what?

Discussion in 'General Science & Technology' started by ricardonest, Jan 25, 2012.

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  1. ricardonest Registered Senior Member

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  3. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    The Mother of All Microscopes

    This laser isn't just powerful and it doesn't just emit coherent X-rays. (That's amazing enough.) It's also fast. Really, really fast.

    Here's something that Stanford University's Applied Physics department was saying about Ultrafast Science on a 2009 page that no longer exists. It's so incredibly cool that I'll quote parts of it now. The blue highlighting is by me.

    (and even more amazing than that...)

    Here's the Photon Ultrafast Laser Science and Engineering (PULSE) laboratory at SLAC, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

    http://www.stanford.edu/group/pulse_institute/WhatIsPulse.shtml

    They say (blue highlighting by me)...

    LCLS is their Linac Coherent Light Source. A description of what they are up to can be found at:

    http://lcls.slac.stanford.edu/WhatIsLCLS_1.aspx

    LCLS isn't exactly your old tabletop microscope. It's two miles long! It's the old SLAC linear accelerator, that as we speak is being reconstructed into the mother of all X-ray laser microscopes.

    Here's a photograph of just one small part of it (the "undulators" that make the electron beam cough up coherent x-rays):

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    Here's an overview of the whole operation:

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    Last edited: Jan 29, 2012
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  5. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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    Just think that when a sun explodes it creates over 100 million degrees F of heat!
     
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