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Published online 7 October 2009 | Nature 461, 708-709 (2009) | doi:10.1038/461708a
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X-ray free-electron lasers fire up
California's project has the lead as its facility goes live, but Europe aims for its own rapid-fire device.
HAMBURG Heinz Graafsma is tired of the "pretty, but useless" images of proteins that regularly adorn the pages of journals such as Nature. "Chemistry depends on changes," says Graafsma, the head of detectors for photon science at DESY, Germany's high-energy physics laboratory in Hamburg.
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I'm a biochemist, so probably have a fundamental lack of understanding, but why can't an xfel be built using a synchrotron? Surely you could then have multple take off points for electron bunches and feed them in to attached undulators to generate the X-ray laser pulses. Wouldn't this help alleviate the problem of only having one station per accelerator? Could they be added to existing synchrotrons like the new Diamond source? Hopefully some kind physicist will point out the problem...