All That Matters

X-ray data of protein crystals obtained from over 15,000 single snapshots. Credit: Thomas White, DESY

When you go to the doctor for an X-ray, the nurse or doctor briefly disappear behind a screen, presses a button for a brief moment, and you’re all set. It seems an X-ray takes about a second but the actual exposure times is much faster. Milliseconds more likely.

Such speeds seem like almost an eternity compared to what is achieved by a new generation of X-ray sources that have begun to become operational: free-electron X-ray lasers. The first of these big machines is the LCLS at Stanford University, which achieves laser pulses shorter than 70 femtoseconds (100 femtoseconds = 1/10 of a trillionth of a second). The beam intensities of these lasers are ten billion times brighter than the sun. And all this with a potential imaging precision down to the atomic scale. In other words, if you like to take things to the extreme, these lasers are for you.

In one of the first studies to make use of the LCLS X-ray free-electron laser, two research collaborations now present first experiments on biological samples in this week’s Nature.

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