Public lecture presented by Mike Minitti
Since it began operation in 2009, SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) has allowed scientists to make new types of X-ray measurements that were once thought unattainable by delivering one trillion X-ray photons – particles of X-ray light – in incredibly short bursts of less than 30 femtoseconds, or millionths of a billionth of a second. Now we have used this capability to make a “molecular movie” of a molecule undergoing a chemical reaction from start to finish, with frames just a few femtoseconds long.
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