Kneip, S. and McGuffey, C. and Martins, J. L. and Martins, S. F. and Bellei, C. and Chvykov, V. and Dollar, F. and Fonseca, R. and Huntington, C. and Kalintchenko, G. and Maksimchuk, A. and Mangles, S. P. D. and Matsuoka, T. and Nagel, S. R. and Palmer, C. A. J. and Schreiber, J. and Phuoc, K. Ta and Thomas, A. G. R. and Yanovsky, V. and Silva, L. O. and Krushelnick, K. and Najmudin, Z. (2010) Bright spatially coherent synchrotron X-rays from a table-top source. Nature Physics, 6 (12). pp. 980-983. ISSN 1745-2473
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
Each successive generation of X-ray machines has opened up new frontiers in science, such as the first radiographs and the determination of the structure of DNA. State-of-the-art X-ray sources can now produce coherent high-brightness Xrays of greater than kiloelectronvolt energy and promise a new revolution in imaging complex systems on nanometre and femtosecond scales. Despite the demand, only a few dedicated synchrotron facilities exist worldwide, in part because of the size and cost of conventional (accelerator) technology(1). Here we demonstrate the use of a new generation of laser-driven plasma accelerators(2), which accelerate high-charge electron beams to high energy in short distances(3-5), to produce directional, spatially coherent, intrinsically ultrafast beams of hard X-rays. This reduces the size of the synchrotron source from the tens of metres to the centimetre scale, simultaneously accelerating and wiggling the electron beam. The resulting X-ray source is 1,000 times brighter than previously reported plasma wigglers(6,7) and thus has the potential to facilitate a myriad of uses across the whole spectrum of light-source applications.