Cool tour behind the radiation fence today.
Two miles long, the Stanford linear accelerator (SLAC) is the second longest building in the world, behind the Great Wall of China.
Each of these klystron tubes in a row to the horizon is like a microwave, just 60,000x more powerful.
Today’s experiment was feeding x-ray bursts to the Linac Coherent Light Source, which works much like a high-speed camera, enabling scientists to take stop-motion pictures of atoms and molecules in motion. The x-rays are about a billion times brighter than other sources, and they flash the subject for less than a tenth of a trillionth of a second. In a forthcoming paper, they used this technique to image the influenza virus in its natural state. Developing a single-virus accelerator itself took many years of effort.
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