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Seeing the invisible with synchrotron light
last modified
13-09-2006 10:07
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For thousands of years, our knowledge
of the world around us was limited to the macroscopic scale, objects we can see with our eyes. Although the concept of atoms has
been around since ancient times, it wasn't until the 20th century that we were finally
able to explore matter at the atomic scale.
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To 'see' atoms, which have dimensions of the order of a tenth
of a nanometre (a nanometre is one billionth of a metre, i.e. 10-9m), you need
to use a different form of "light", one that has a much shorter
wavelength than visible light. This type of "light" is known as
X-rays. Discovered by Röntgen in 1895, X-rays have many well-known
applications in medicine. But they can also be used to reveal important
information about the organisation of the atoms that make up a material.
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| The synchrotron light produced at the ESRF consists largely
of very "bright" X-rays, in other words, the beam of X-rays
is as thin as a hair and very intense. Just as laser light is much more
intense and concentrated than the beam of light generated by a flashlight,
so an X-ray beam produced by a synchrotron is a thousand billion times brighter
than the beam produced by a hospital X-ray machine. |
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Friday Lecture : Thermal Stability - The Nano Hutch