X-rays articles from across Nature Portfolio

X-ray computed tomography is a widely used technique for non-invasively visualizing the interior of the human body. A. Ben Yahuda and colleagues report a technique for incorporating scattered radiation data in Computed Tomography scans to improve image resolution and minimize radiation exposure for patients.

Researchers focused hard X-rays from a free-electron laser down to transverse dimensions of ~7 nm × 7 nm, enabling a two-order increase in intensity of photons and yielding access to the elusive 10²² W cm⁻² regime. Such intense, short-wavelength electromagnetic radiation may probe atomic, molecular and optical physics with extremely high resolution.

While MHz repetition rates at modern X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) facilities achieve remarkable capabilities for imaging, the high repetition rates may also lead to new stability problems. The authors experimentally demonstrate that thermoelastic displacements between successive pulses can be detrimental to the performance of cavity-based XFEL

High-quality measurements with good statistics, especially in a single shot, require fluxes and energies beyond the current capabilities of laserbased betatron x-ray sources. Here, the authors propose a method to enhance the flux and brightness of such sources without increasing the laser energy, paving the way for single-shot x-ray measurements in ultrafast science.

The fast response and efficiency of plastic scintillators are severely degraded by the preferential population of slow triplet excited states in luminescence centres, such as in dye molecules. This issue can be solved by hot exciton manipulation, which avoids population of the lowest triplet state.

The WavemiX network has made significant progress in bringing together theoreticians, experimentalists, and machine scientists. At the third edition of its flagship workshop, different communities collaborated to discuss the practical challenges of achieving superior spatial and time resolution and devise useful applications in ultrafast science.

The demonstration of a low-loss diamond mirror cavity that can temporally store X-ray pulses brings hope for a future generation of X-ray free electron lasers.

Due to dispersion, the group velocity of laser pulses propagating in plasmas slows down with increasing wavelength, which presents challenges for precision-controlled plasma interactions. Now, new techniques for spatio-temporal pulse shaping have lifted this limitation in the demonstration of short-pulse table-top soft X-ray lasers.