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Dr. William Graves

ASU Biophysics Seminar Series

Today x-ray science is pursued either at major facilities housed in national labs, where the large synchrotrons and x-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) produce an x-ray brilliance of at least 1020 photons/(sec mm2 mrad2 0.1%), or else it is pursued in university and medical laboratories where century old vacuum tube technology provides source brilliance of 109 at best, leaving an enormous 11 orders of magnitude difference in performance.  This talk will describe advances in lasers and accelerators that combine to create a tabletop hard x-ray source that is intermediate between these extremes.  The source relies on inverse Compton scattering of laser photons on 20 MeV electrons produced by a short one meter accelerator.  We will also look into the near future to describe methods to generate nanopatterned electron beams that may be manipulated to produce fully coherent x-rays from a tabletop XFEL.