Promising Use for SLAC
Lately, experimental high-energy particle physics (HEPP) is getting harder to do, mostly because it becomes more and more expensive to run the particle accelerators that are the workhorse of HEPP. For the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), however, they’re figuring out something else to do with their expensive accelerator: the Linac Coherent Light Source.
Essentially, they’re going to use the linear accelerator to jiggle electrons and coax them into emitting X-rays. What for? To create a giant, short-pulsed X-ray laser! Why?
Well, X-rays are currently used to study the atomic structures of a lot of different molecules, from synthetic materials to proteins and protein clusters. Right now, because of the damage caused by X-rays to the imaging substrate, we need crystals of the material in order to get a proper image. With the fast X-ray pulsed laser, though, we can get a snapshot of the molecule with the laser in a very short time, getting a picture of our target before it decomposes.
In addition, the pulse laser means we can see the structure of things in short time points, which means we can take snapshots of chemical reactions in progress! By combining this technology with the crossed molecular beam methods developed at Harvard by Dudley Herschbach could revolutionize chemistry, biology, and physics!
