Persis Drell, Director Emerita at SLAC
The Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is the world’s brightest source of hard X-ray laser light. Not only is this light a billion times brighter than any previous hard X-ray source, it also comes in strobe-like pulses just a few tens of femtoseconds long. This combination of high intensity and ultrafast pulses allows us to study processes at atomic time scales and atomic length scales, opening new frontiers in time-resolved physics and chemistry studies. I will introduce the principles of how the LCLS works and present some of the early experimental results, with a view to the new frontier of science that this remarkable tool has opened.