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The Conversation
The Conversation
Uwe Bergmann, Professor of Ultrafast X-Ray Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Our team of physicists inadvertently generated the shortest X-ray pulses ever observed

The Stanford linear accelerator creates super short X-ray pulses. Steve Jurvetson/Flickr, CC BY

X-ray beams aren’t used just by doctors to see inside your body and tell whether you have a broken bone. More powerful beams made up of very short flashes of X-rays can help scientists peer into the structure of individual atoms and molecules and differentiate types of elements.

But getting an X-ray laser beam that delivers super short flashes to capture the fastest processes in nature isn’t easy – it’s a whole science in itself.

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