All fired up over world's biggest X-ray laser gun

straitstimes.com ^

[BenLurkin]

A sleek, subterranean X-ray laser set to be unveiled in Germany today, the most powerful in the world yet, has scientists in a dozen fields jostling to train its mighty beam on their projects.

European XFEL will reveal - and capture in images - secrets at the sub-atomic level, promising breakthroughs in medicine, biology, energy, information technology and chemistry.

It will map the molecular architecture of viruses and cells, render three-dimensional nano-scale snapshots and film chemical reactions as they unfold. Earth scientists should be able to duplicate and study processes occurring deep inside planets, including our own.

"The laser is the biggest, and the most powerful, source of X-rays ever made," said Dr Olivier Napoly, a member of the French Atomic Energy Commission which helped to build the complex.

The European X-Ray Free Electron Laser, or XFEL, is lodged in a series of tunnels up to 38m underground near the city of Hamburg.

Its centrepiece is the world's longest - 1.7km - superconducting linear accelerator, designed to provide the energy needed to generate X-ray flashes a billion times brighter than the best conventional radiation sources.

That is 27,000 X-ray flashes per second, compared with the 120 flashes per second produced by a laser of the same type at the US National Accelerator Laboratory in Stanford, California, and 60 flashes per second generated by another in Japan.

[EEGator]

Gamma rays...

[mad_as_he$$]

HuH? LASER stands for: Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. X-rays are on the EM spectrum but not usually - except apparently in Europe - considered “light”......

What am I missing here?

[PIF]

Hot tar would help as would spines ... unfortunately, both are outlawed in Western European Countries - the first uses fossil fuel, causing irreparable environmental harm and global warming, the other is racially insensitive and lacks diversity ...

[PIF]

"Then I realize the smaller the object you look for, the smaller the area you can look in." ... the more uncertain the location of the object becomes especially at Planck length (1.616229(38)×10−35 metres.) - while the act of observation changes the observed object, perhaps even calling it into existence ... read your quantum mechanics manual, scientists.

[mrsmith]

That seriously cracks me up!