NEWS The first laser-driven generation of twin electron and x-ray beams for filming electron motion in matter shows Umeå Professor László Veisz in his Physics Laboratory. The study has been published in the scientific journal Nature Photonics.
Twin-electron and X-ray pulses.
PhotoConventional electron accelerators, such as the enormous Max IV Laboratory in Lund southern Sweden, and high-energy photon beams generated by them play an important role in science, medicine, as well as industry.
A recently developed alternative for these conventional devices is laser-driven electron acceleration. It provides good quality electron beams with more than thousand times stronger accelerating fields corresponding to a significant decrease in size of the facility.
Entirely new opportunities could be explored with a source of twin-electron or X-ray pulses. One pulse starts an ultrafast process such as changes in electronic configuration and a second synchronized one films its dynamics.
An international team of physicists from the newly started Relativistic Attosecond Physics Laboratory of Professor László Veisz at Umeå University, Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, and LMU Munich Germany, managed to extend this laser-driven technology to generate two synchronized and separately tunable femtosecond electron beams, that can produce also two X-ray flashes with different photon energy.
"The new knowledge can be used in the future to track fundamental material behaviour on a laboratory scale", says László Veisz, Professor at the Department of Physics at Umeå university.
Wenz, J. et al: Dual-energy electron beams from a compact laser-driven accelerator. Nature Photonics(2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-019-0356-z
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