In May 2016 scientists at Stanford University in the USA published a movie showing an X-ray pulse vaporising a water droplet (Figure 1). The movie was produced with the world’s most powerful X-ray laser, the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), which delivers bursts of X-rays lasting just 10 femtoseconds (10 × 10−15s = 10 −14s), allowing very rapid, small-scale processes to be tracked and imaged. The LCLS can even produce stopframe images of molecules in motion (Figure 2). The LCLS has been so successful that a similar instrument has been built in Japan and there are plans to build a high-power X-ray laser for Europe based in Hamburg, Germany.
In this issue you can read about a ground-breaking use of X-rays that would have been worthy of a Nobel prize (‘Not the Nobel prize in 1916’, pp. 18–21), and about the experiments that first demonstrated that X-rays can collide like particles (‘The Compton effect’, pp. 6–9).
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