Wednesday, November 22, 2006
X-ray Image Captured In Record Time
California (USA), 21 November: An X-ray image of micrometer-sized stick figures taken in a record time of just 25 femtoseconds is described by Henry Chapman and colleagues in the December issue of Nature Physics. The image, patterned into a metal film, was taken at around a trillion times faster than a conventional flash photograph- just moments before the film evaporated at a temperature of 60,000 degrees Celsius.
The image was collected using radiation produced by the FLASH 'free-electron laser' that began operation at the DESY facility in Germany earlier this year. This feat demonstrates an important proof-of-principle for a technique that should enable atomic-scale imaging of the structure of a much wider range of molecules than is possible using conventional synchrotron sources.
Free-electron lasers represent an exciting development in fields ranging from structural biology to nanotechnology. These lasers produce an intense and extremely short burst of X-rays enabling the structure of individual organic molecules to be collected, without the need to first form them into a crystal as is needed in conventional X-ray analysis. Although atomic-scale resolution is not demonstrated in the present work, this could soon be possible when the first of a new generation of more powerful free-electron sources, such as the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in the US, are complete.
(ResearchSEA)
The image was collected using radiation produced by the FLASH 'free-electron laser' that began operation at the DESY facility in Germany earlier this year. This feat demonstrates an important proof-of-principle for a technique that should enable atomic-scale imaging of the structure of a much wider range of molecules than is possible using conventional synchrotron sources.
Free-electron lasers represent an exciting development in fields ranging from structural biology to nanotechnology. These lasers produce an intense and extremely short burst of X-rays enabling the structure of individual organic molecules to be collected, without the need to first form them into a crystal as is needed in conventional X-ray analysis. Although atomic-scale resolution is not demonstrated in the present work, this could soon be possible when the first of a new generation of more powerful free-electron sources, such as the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in the US, are complete.
(ResearchSEA)
# posted by mediabhartiwebsolutions @ 5:33 AM 
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