https://indico.jacow.org/event/44/contributions/440/
A tunable, tabletop, Inverse Compton Scattering (ICS) hard X-ray source is being designed and built at Eindhoven University of Technology as part of a European Interreg program between The Netherlands and Belgium. This compact X-ray source will bridge the gap between conventional lab sources and synchrotrons: The X-ray photon energy will be generated between 1 and 100 keV with a brilliance typically a few orders of magnitude above the best available lab sources.
In the ICS process photons from a laser pulse bounce off a relativistic electron bunch, turning them into X-ray photons through the relativistic Doppler effect.
There's a presentation slide deck here with more details:
https://indico.cern.ch/event/1088510/contributions/4577523/a...
> In the ICS process photons from a laser pulse bounce off a relativistic electron bunch, turning them into X-ray photons through the relativistic Doppler effect.
They make it sound so simple. Just bounce off a big thing moving towards you to absorb some of it's energy. Fond memories of the time I discovered this effect for myself using a medicine ball and a friend's hamster I was petsitting at the time.
Uh..
Gracie was uninjured, for those concerned. Caught her gently. Learning experience. Future experimentation was done with a lacrosse ball.
Here's a preprint from 2020 by the researchers that I'm assuming describes their tech:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.00270
(Edit: Removed speculation that the system architecture was that of a free-electron laser. Presentation shared by philipkglass indicates it's something different.)
“This mid-range capability also makes this source suitable for looking into paintings, silicon wafers, or biological material without damaging it. In addition, this source is special because the energy of the X-rays can be very accurately adjusted to the material you want to detect. You can 'tune' it to visualize any periodic table element. In addition, the light beam is reasonably coherent. Because of this, the measurements you can make with it are of great accuracy.”
Now if they could build a compact synchrotron to generate soft X-rays, that would be a huge deal. The semiconductor industry has tried to get that to work for a decade as a light source for "extreme UV". ("Extreme UV" and "soft X-rays" are in the same part of the spectrum.)
One big advantage synchrotrons have is flux over a broad spectrum. When you want monochromatic x-rays you can start with broad spectrum x-rays from a synchrotron source and throw almost all of the photons away, and still have orders of magnitude more x-rays in your 1 eV bandpass beam than the flux of a laboratory source, (even if it has a peak in its spectrum at the energy you want). The plots on slides 4-6 linked in the first comment [1] demonstrate this clearly.
However, the energy range where inverse compton scattering sources seem most attractive are at energies >100 keV where it appears there is the potential for inverse compton sources to approach and even outperform synchrotron bend-magnet sources (slides 31 to 35), particularly in comparison to bend-magnets/wigglers at synchrotrons with lower storage ring energy than facilities like ESRF (6 GeV). High flux at higher energies (>100 keV) is difficult to generate at the more common 2.0-3.0 GeV storage rings.
[1] https://indico.cern.ch/event/1088510/contributions/4577523/a...
This is true only in the exact same way that the statement "UV and visible light is in the same part of the spectrum", or maybe more clearly "the eyeball and the eyelid are in the same part of the body".
The X-ray/UV boundary (10nm) is closer to IR (780nm) than the top of X-ray range (10pm). IR is similarly broad (to 1mm).
Going back I had the opportunity to take two tours of the NSLS at Brookhaven Labs when it was still in operation. I was a bit intrigued by the idea of synchrotron radiation and was wondering if this could be scaled down to a small room sized machine or table top. Indeed - there were attempts but non that were successful at that point - likely around 2008 - 2010.
(Or are "hard" x-rays the wrong thing?)
I believe the novelty here is that the produced x-rays are in a tight range of wavelengths, and that the range can be adjusted.
This article is about a tunable high intensity X-ray source, which can be used instead of a huge synchrotron that could do the same thing.