LCLS is Moving Along
Monday, June 23, 2008
The LCLS is moving along. As part of a project that lasts more than five years it is often difficult to see progress and the goal cans seem just beyond the horizon. There are, however, events that bring your perspective in line with the real progress.
Paul Emma, who heads the accelerator team continues to dazzle us with results that exceed our expectations. The ability to "time" a laser to the X-ray beam is one of the most significant challenges for experiments where we want to excite a sample with an optical laser and then probe it with the LCLS X-ray beam to look for changes in atomic positions in a myriad of different systems. The LCLS team just demonstrated that with respect to a "clock," the timing signal that one can use for the excitation laser we see "jitter," or uncertainty, in the relative arrival time of the electron beam that will create the X-rays of just under 50 femtoseconds. That may not sound like much, in fact isn’t very much and that’s just the point. If the experimenters can time the laser to this same clock with similar accuracy, then we can start to do experiments with time resolution of the same order as the X-ray pulse duration. That’s a big deal. To further boost my anticipation and the reality of progress we just completed a workshop for prospective experimenters for the first hard X-ray instrument planned to come on line by June-July of 2010. A few weeks prior to that, we hosted a workshop for experimenters interested in using the first instrument that will be available—the atomic, molecular and optical (AMO) science instrument, ready in July 2009. The buzz at the AMO workshop was palpable, but its only a year away. More amazing was the atmosphere for the X-ray pump-probe workshop. A group of 60 or so scientists from around the world were truly excited about the possibility to do first experiments now just two years away. There is little doubt this excitement will only build. This enthusiasm is critical for the instrument scientists who are slogging away to build the best for the user community as it supports their mission and recognizes their efforts. posted by Jerry Hastings @ 12:00pm
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