CleanBeta

Super X-ray Detects Art Forgeries And Everything Else 1,000 times Better

A new X-ray beams light-rays 1,000 times brighter and a 1,000 times faster-a single pulse is one ten-thousandth of a billionth of a second-than the most powerful X-ray available today.

“We will have X-ray vision at the nano-scale,” Joel D. Brock, a professor of applied and engineering physics at Cornell University, predicted.

The X-ray, pioneered by Brock and other researchers at Cornell University Laboratory for Elementary Particle Physics will improve the ability to capture fine details about living systems like viruses vastly greater detail. For example, current X-ray essentially create ‘snapshots’ of a particular virus, but the new x-ray will generate 3-D movies of the virus as it moves, clings to and infects a cell. The new X-ray technology will apply to any scientific research that currently uses X-rays from archaeology to zoology.

How Energy Recovery Linacs (Linear Accelerator)

Moving beyond traditional X-ray crystallography systems–where the arrangement of atoms in crystalline material is revealed by analyzing the way X-ray beams are scattered from electrons in the crystal–the energy-recovery linac offers significant advantages. For one, materials subjected to ultrabright X-ray pulses need not be in crystalline form. And the tightly focused beam allows studies at much smaller scales.

As envisioned and invented by experimental physicists at Cornell, energy-recovery linear accelerators produce high-energy, pulsed X-ray beams by injecting electrons into the electromagnetic fields of a series of superconducting microwave cavities in a linear accelerator. Then, in a return loop, the electron beam is turned into X-rays by passing through undulators, which force the beam to oscillate to the right and left of its mean path with horseshoe magnets of alternating orientations. The pulsed X-rays are now ready for studies in multiple stations at the facility.

While the ERL X-ray beam loses about 0.04 percent of its energy during oscillation, 99.98 percent of its remaining energy is recaptured into the electromagnetic fields when the electrons are re-injected into the linac for deceleration–providing energy to accelerate subsequent bunches of electrons.

Compared to a traditional storage-ring X-ray source, such as CHESS, which recycles electrons billions of times but suffers from a compromised beam size, ERLs send each bunch of electrons through the undulators only once. Again and again, ERLs recover and reuse energy that accelerates electron bunches, while maintaining very small beam size–the key to the brilliance needed to study intimate details at the nano-scale.

The superconducting microwave cavities, which are cooled to -456 degrees Fahrenheit to produce hardly any heat during continuous operation, are among the novel components that proved their worth during the prototype-testing stage of the ERL project. Another component was the photocathode gun that produces electrons–in extremely intense short-duration bunches–for acceleration in the superconducting microwave cavities.