Tabletop Ultrabright Kiloelectronvolt X-Ray Sources from Xe and Kr Hollow Atom States

摘要

Albert Einstein, the father of relativity, once said, "Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better". Today available higher resolution tabletop tool to look deep into matters and living thing is an x-ray source. Although the available tabletop x-rays sources of the 20th century, such as the ones used for medical or dental x-rays are tremendously useful for medical diagnostics and industry, a major disadvantage is that they have low quality skillful brightness, which limits its resolution and accuracy. In the other hand, x-ray free-electrons laser (XFEL) and synchrotron radiation sources provided extreme bright x-rays. However, number of applications of XFEL and synchrotron such as medical and industrials, has been hampered by their size, complexity, and cost. This has set a goal of demonstrating x-ray source with enough brightness for potential applications in an often-called tabletop compact x-ray source that could be operated in university laboratory or hospitals. We have developed two tabletop ultrabright keV x-ray sources, one from a Xe hollow-atom states and the other one from Kr hollow-atom stares with a unique characteristic that makes them complementary to currently-available extreme-light sources; XFEL, and synchrotron x-ray source. Upgraded tabletop ultra-fast KrF* pump-laser interacts with target rare-gas clusters and produces hollow-atom states, which later coherently collapse to the empty inner-shell and thereby generate keV x-ray radiation. The KrF* pump-laser beam is self-focused and forms a self-channel to guide the generated x-ray radiation in the direction of the pump-laser beam to produce directed x-ray beam. Xe (M) x-ray source operates at 1.2-1.6 nm wavelength while the Kr(L) x-ray source operates in 600-800 pm wavelength. System is mounted upon 3 optical-tables (5´x12´) with two KrF amplifiers at a repetition rate of 0.1 Hz. A lower bound for brightness value for both Xe and Kr x-ray sources is 1026 photons s-1mm-2mrad-2 0. This is greater than average brightness (1022 photons s-1mm -2mrad-2 0. 1% BW) of the available x-ray free electron lasers and synchrotron x-ray sources.