The future looks bright for the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory’s Linac Coherent Light Source—very bright, indeed. The powerful laser creates X-rays 10 billion times more brilliant than existing sources. So intense are these X-ray pulses that they can resolve detail at a scale 1/10,000 the width of a human hair, making it possible to observe molecules in action. What’s more, a team of collaborators from SLAC and five other institutions reported in the journal Nature this summer that they were able to fine-tune the pulses with enough precision to pluck electrons, one by one, from a single atom.
Photograph by Brad Plummer / SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
