Toward X-ray movies
Ultrashort bursts of electrons have several important applications in scientific imaging, but producing them has typically required a costly, power-hungry apparatus about the size of a car. In the journal Optica, researchers at MIT, the German Synchrotron, and the University of Hamburg in Germany describe a new technique for generating electron bursts, which could be the basis of a shoebox-sized device that consumes only a fraction as much power as its predecessors. Ultrashort electron beams are used to directly gather information about materials that are undergoing chemical reactions or changes of physical state. But after being fired down a particle accelerator a half a mile long, they’re also used to produce ultrashort X-rays. Last year, in Nature Communications, the same group of MIT and Hamburg researchers reported the prototype of a small “linear accelerator” that could serve the same purpose as the much larger and more expensive particle accelerator. That technology, together with...