World’s biggest X-ray laser opens vast vistas

Paris: A sleek, subterranean X-ray laser (pictured) to be unveiled on Friday in Germany, by far the most powerful in the world, has scientists in a dozen fields jostling to train its mighty beam on their projects. European XFEL will reveal — and capture in images — secrets at the sub-atomic level, promising breakthroughs in medicine, biology, energy, information technology and chemistry. It will map the molecular architecture of viruses and cells; render three-dimensional nano-scale snapshots; and film chemical reactions as they unfold. Earth scientists should be able to duplicate and study processes occurring deep inside planets, including our own. The European X-Ray Free Electron Laser, or XFEL, is lodged in a series of tunnels up to 38 metres (125 feet) underground near the city of Hamburg. Its centrepiece is the world’s longest — 1.7 kilometres (one mile) — superconducting linear accelerator, designed to provide the energy needed to generate X-ray flashes a billion times brighter than the best conventional radiation sources. That’s 27,000 X-ray flashes per second, compared to the 120/sec produced by a laser of the same type at the US National Accelerator Laboratory in Stanford, California, and 60/sec generated by another in Japan. — AFP