Speaker
Description
Light sources have enabled a number of analytical applications in the industry and society, such as medicine or security. The cutting down of wavelength well below the UV, about 125 years ago, has permitted deeper inspection, atomic resolution, photoionization, and structural analysis. The generation of X-ray is largely linked to cathode tubes, in which electrons bombard an anode to induce fluorescence or Bremsstrahlung. This mechanism to incoherent radiation is typical in lamps.
The demonstration of the laser, 60 years ago, has permitted a dramatic progress in diagnostics and therapy thanks to the enhancement in brightness and coherence. Although this technology is half the age of that of X-rays, a merging is foreseeable to combine the advantages of both in the future.
Present-day X-ray lasers are essentially fourth generation beamlines of linear particle accelerators of km length, which strictly speaking are not based on the laser effect. Beamlines are not accessible on a daily basis and the related research is mainly of fundamental character. Such proof-of-principle research is important in academic domains, but less of immediate impact in the industry and for societal applications. Intense work is however done to generate coherent X-Ray radiation with much smaller devices, and in this lecture a complete overview is given. Many of the above-mentioned concepts are elucidated.
