X-ray Science
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Scientists Make the First Molecular Movie of One of Nature’s Most Widely Used Light Sensors
The X-ray laser movie shows what happens when light hits retinal, a key part of vision in animals and photosynthesis in microbes. The action takes place in a trillionth of an eye blink.
Work Begins on New SLAC Facility for Revolutionary Accelerator Science
The goal: develop plasma technologies that could shrink future accelerators up to 1,000 times, potentially paving the way for next-generation particle colliders and powerful light sources.
X-Ray Laser Scientists Develop a New Way to Watch Bacteria Attack Antibiotics
The researchers observed how an enzyme from drug-resistant tuberculosis bacteria damages an antibiotic molecule. The new technique provides a powerful tool to examine changes in biological molecules as they happen.
X-ray Laser Reveals Ultrafast Dance of Liquid Water
Water is more complicated than it seems. Now a study led by researchers at Stockholm University has probed the movements of its molecules on a timescale of millionths of a billionth of a second.
Scientists Turn X-ray Laser Into World’s Fastest Water Heater
Experiments at SLAC heated water from room temperature to 100,000 degrees Celsius in less than a millionth of a millionth of a second, producing an exotic state of water that could shed light on Earth’s most important liquid.
SLAC’s X-ray Laser Opens New View on Proteins Related to Alzheimer’s Disease
By placing the tiniest strands of proteins on one-atom-thick graphene, scientists capture promising X-ray laser images of these elusive biomolecules that play a key role in neurodegenerative diseases.
Scientists Find a New Way to Make Novel Materials by ‘Un-Squeezing’
Like turning a snowball back into fluffy snow, a new technique turns high-density materials into a lower-density one by applying the chemical equivalent of ‘negative pressure.’
X-Ray Scientists Create Tiny, Super-Thin Sheets of Flowing Water that Shimmer Like Soap Bubbles
The liquid sheets – less than 100 water molecules thick – will let researchers probe chemical, physical and biological processes, and even the nature of water itself, in a way they could never do before.
A SLAC Legend Gives the Lab His Lifetime Collection of Precious Foils
The foils, each made from a single chemical element, are used to calibrate X-ray equipment at SLAC’s SSRL synchrotron, and were donated by long-time user, Farrel Lytle.
Scientists Use Machine Learning to Speed Discovery of Metallic Glass
SLAC and its collaborators are transforming the way new materials are discovered. In a new report, they combine artificial intelligence and accelerated experiments to discover potential alternatives to steel in a fraction of the time.
