The Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) is constructing an advanced X-ray camera with a frame rate of 4.5 million fps for a major research facility that will conduct research on the structure of matter, drug discovery and other research works.
Generation of X-ray laser flashes in an undulator. Credit: European XFEL
STFC is developing the X-ray camera in partnership with University of Glasgow. It will deliver the X-ray camera to the billion-euro European X-ray Free-Electron Laser (XFEL) facility in 2012. The two-mile-long facility is being constructed on a site close to Hamburg in Northern Germany and is slated for operation in 2015. STFC inked the £3 million prototype partnership deal for building the camera subsequent to the visit made by the Detector Advisory Committee of the European XFEL.
The selection of the STFC is based on its proven abilities in the design of advanced imaging devices and sophisticated microelectronics such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Existing X-ray cameras cannot be used in the European XFEL facility, as they are engineered to capture pictures during the collision of a constant beam of X-rays on matter.
The European XFEL facility will utilize superconducting accelerator technology to speed up electrons for the generation of X-ray flashes with brightness that is billion times more than those generated by traditional X-ray sources. The short, powerful X-ray flashes lasting less than a hundred million billionth of a second have the characteristics of a laser light and thus can be used to capture three-dimensional X-ray images of individual molecules.
SFTC is designing the X-ray camera to work in combination with hyper-brilliant, hyper-short X-ray flashes. The European XFEL will use the camera to study the behavior of matter, investigate the individual cell’s molecular composition and analyze the atomic details of viruses.