By XRnanotech
In the last decades, the brightness of X-ray sources has skyrocketed, with free electron lasers reaching over 100 million times the brilliance of the sun. This has opened up important fields of research, but also revealed a crucial limitation of X-ray optics: At such high radiation energies, they melt. We have developed a method to process optics from monolithic diamond, the most heat-resistant natural material to easily withstand the extreme intensity of FEL X-ray beams and thus relieve this bottleneck in FEL experimentation. Diamond optics and diamond crystal nanostructures pictured here are more than capable by our team opening up new possibilities in utilizing diamond in nanofabrication.
