Researchers have announced an important step in the development of a next-gen technology for making X-ray free-electron laser pulses brighter and more stable. They used precisely aligned mirrors made of high-quality synthetic diamond to steer X-ray laser pulses around a rectangular racetrack inside a vacuum chamber.
Setups like these are at the heart of cavity-based X-ray free-electron lasers, or CBXFELs, which scientists are designing to make X-ray laser pulses brighter and cleaner—more like regular laser beams are today.
SLAC and Stanford PhD student Rachel Margraf and SLAC scientist Gabriel Marcus align the cavity's four diamond crystal mirrors from the experiment's control room. The mirrors appear in the two upper left monitors; monitors at desk level are used to control motors that make small angular adjustments to the mirrors. Credit: Diling Zhu/SLAC National Accelerator LaboratoryDespite their name, X-ray laser pulses are not yet fully laser-like.
"The question was how to produce diamond mirrors of high enough quality and how to line them up with enough precision to steer the X-rays around the cavity," Zhu said."Ideally, in our case, the cavity would also fit into the long, narrow tunnel that houses the LCLS undulators."and innovations include finding the best way to take X-rays out of the cavity so they can be used for experiments and to optimally cool the mirrors, if needed.
"The bigger the cavity is," she said,"the tighter the alignment tolerances are, and the scientific community had been skeptical that those tolerances could be achieved." The experimental apparatus is shaped roughly like a barbell, with two boxy vacuum chambers at the ends and beam pipes connecting them. X-ray pulses travel from the front cavity chamber to the back one through one pipe, then back to the front cavity through the other pipe, completing a 46-foot loop. Diamond mirrors inside the cavities guide the pulses along precisely the right path.
The team first used X-ray microscopes from SPring-8 and the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Light Source at SLAC to carefully examine each crystal and cherry-pick the ones with the fewest defects in their crystal structure. Then they identified areas within those crystals that were defect-free for processing into mirrors.
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