The poles alternately attract and repel passing electron bunches, which swerve back and forth in an undulating motion that forces them to give off X-rays.Īs each electron bunch travels with its associated X-rays, they start to interact with each other. The Undulator Hall houses thousands of special magnets, spaced a few millimeters apart and arrayed so their north-south magnetic poles alternate. The electron pulses then enter the LCLS Undulator Hall, the heart of LCLS, where they are put to work generating X-ray laser light.
#COHERENT X RAY SERIES#
The plate responds by releasing a burst of electrons, which are accelerated by a series of devices to boost their energy. The process of producing X-ray pulses starts in a section of SLAC's linear accelerator.įirst a drive laser generates a precise pulse of ultraviolet light, which travels to an injector "gun" and strikes the surface of a copper plate. LCLS was the first laser in the world, and one of just two now in operation, to produce "hard," or very-high-energy X-rays. This improved understanding of ultrafast chemistry at the scale of atoms and molecules could lead to more efficient and controllable chemical reactions. Research at LCLS is improving our understanding of the earliest steps in chemical reactions, including catalytic reactions that are critical in producing fuels and other industrial chemicals. LCLS is enabling pioneering research across many fields: At another extreme, LCLS has provided a first glimpse of the structure of supercooled water, which remains liquid well below its normal freezing temperature, and opened a new window into tiny quantum tornadoes, which form in fast-spinning droplets of supercooled liquid helium. Scientists have been able to measure stress, strain and failure in advanced aerospace materials, and have studied how matter behaves under the extreme pressures that drive the formation of planets. Over the past few years, LCLS has enabled scientists to uncover the 3-D molecular structure of proteins involved in the transmission of many important diseases, such as African sleeping sickness, Dengue fever and the Zika virus it has aided the development of next-generation painkillers that seek to reduce side effects such as drug dependency it has obtained live snapshots of the fleeting steps in the water-splitting reaction in photosynthesis and it has studied the microscopic components of air pollution at the nanoscale. LCLS creates X-ray pulses a billion times brighter than previously available at synchrotrons.
LCLS currently delivers 120 X-ray pulses per second, each one lasting just quadrillionths of a second, or " femtoseconds"-a timescale at which the motion of atoms can be seen and tracked. Since the start of operations in 2009: 3,000+ Unique users 900+ Experiments 1450+ Publications New Extremes for X-ray Science Data from LCLS experiments have generated over 1450 articles in peer-reviewed scientific publications, with a quarter of them appearing in prominent journals like Science and Nature. With over 13,000 scientific user visits in its first 10 years of operation, researchers from around the world have conducted groundbreaking experiments in fields as diverse as chemical catalysis, human health, quantum materials science, and the physics of planetary formation. Its snapshots can be strung together into “molecular movies” that show chemical reactions as they happen. LCLS takes X-ray snapshots of atoms and molecules at work, providing atomic resolution detail on ultrafast timescales to reveal fundamental processes in materials, technology and living things.
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