Moore Foundation grantees at Berkeley Lab are developing compact-free electron lasers that will serve as powerful, affordable X-ray sources for scientific discovery. This new technology could lead to portable and high-contrast X-ray imaging to observe chemical reactions, visualize the flow of electrons, or watch biological processes unfold.
Currently, X-ray light sources hold great scientific promise but there are only a handful of these light sources worldwide: each is miles long and costs hundreds of millions of dollars to develop. What’s more, access to these facilities is greatly limited, clogging the pipeline of scientific experiments possible.
A free-electron laser uses an accelerator to produce a high-energy electron beam that produces laser radiation. Unlike conventional accelerators, laser-plasma accelerators use high-power optical lasers instead of high-power radio frequency waves to accelerate electrons across short distances, typically centimeters.
These electrons “surf” on waves generated by the interaction between the laser and the plasma, much like a surfer pushed forward by an ocean wave. Laser-plasma accelerators are desirable because they hold the potential to produce a compact, inexpensive high-energy electron beam compared to a conventional accelerator.
The Moore Foundation grant will enable experiments that address this important question by observing free electron lasers operating at short wavelengths using an electron beam from a laser-plasma accelerator.
"State of the art X-ray sources offer an unprecedented opportunity to probe the microscopic world, but access to these sources is extremely limited,” said Ernie Glover, science program officer at the Moore Foundation. “If successful, this project will demonstrate a path to significantly reduce the size and cost of these sources and greatly expand their scientific impact.”
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