With their ultrashort, powerful pulses of high-energy radiation, x-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) are unsurpassed in their ability to freeze-frame chemical reactions, interactions between drugs and target proteins, and electron dynamics. They are also huge and expensive: The Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), built on SLAC’s existing 3-km-long linear accelerator, cost more than $500 million, and the 3.4-km-long European XFEL, located near Hamburg, Germany, cost about €1.25 billion ($1.4 billion). Globally, only five XFELs have been built.
In March a consortium of institutions headed by Arizona State University (ASU) announced plans to design and build a more affordable, compact XFEL—or CXFEL—that could be housed at academic institutions, medical centers, and industrial facilities. Supported by a $91 million NSF grant and $80 million from ASU, the collaboration expects to complete the construction of a room-size CXFEL in five years at the Biodesign Institute on ASU’s Tempe campus.
The new instrument will have the potential to produce extremely short-duration x-ray pulses to access the attosecond regime, less than one millionth of a billionth of a second. That resolution will be able to image molecules as they interact at an atomic level.
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