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Comment by mgibbs63 | Hacker News Reader

Synchrotron lightsources are a dime a dozen. For real power, you want a free electron laser. The Linac Coherent Light Source at SLAC (right in Silicon Valley's back yard) pumps out an X-ray beam with about 750,000 times as many photons per second, and in pulses that are about 200 times faster.

https://portal.slac.stanford.edu/sites/lcls_public/aboutlcls...

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If you want even larger systems, you should check out the European XFEL, which was just opened, and is now the most powerful free electron laser in existence. http://www.xfel.eu/

It’s quite a sight.

As a die hard LCLS supporter, I have to say: XFEL has the more powerful electron beam, but LCLS is still in the lead in terms of X-rays right now (if pulse intensity/peak power is the measure).

XFEL is really an amazing machine, though, and once it is fully commissioned, it will take the X-ray crown as well.

Couple questions:

1) How do you steer an FEL?

2) These seem like they'd be pretty good for destroying hardware (drones, cell phones). Is that true?

On (2), I do know that FEL analysis of small samples such as the ones for protein structure analysis entails completely disintegrating them (off goes all the electrons, then the nuclei quickly realize they have nothing in common anymore and decide to go their separate ways), and analyzing the structure is done on the basis of reading the radiation scatter patterns from the instant between when the beam makes contact and when the molecule has utterly lost the structure in question.

I think it would be safe to say FEL isn't exactly non-destructive for hardware.

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