Hey guys, you may remember a few days ago i posted about a story that researchers from Cornell were venturing into a new way of creating X-Rays called Energy Recovery Linac (ERL), which should result in much more powerful x-rays.

Well i was slightly skeptical to the claim that things being examined using the ERL, did not have to be in crystalline form, so i decided to talk to a professor at my school that teaches the x-ray physics course and he did indeed confirm that this could well be the case if they were able to focus a strong beam on a single structure (like a protein for example). This is something that will definitely please many in the field when/if the ERL comes, because today when you intend to look at the structure of a protein you must first make it into a crystalline material before it can be probed using the x-ray. That is to say you need to have a lot of proteins arranged in a static symmetric way, which can be quite a hassle.

Also something he pointed out to me as he read the article, that i hadn’t really noticed was that the projected cost of building an ERL is not that high compared to Synchrotrons (which is the source most commonly used to create high powered x-ray beams). The ERL is projected to cost around 300-400 million$, which seems to be about the same they are projecting the new Synchrotron MAX-IV is going to cost (source). However if you compare it to another exciting project that also aims at creating very high powered x-ray beams, the free electron x-ray laser (FEL), their cost is a projected one billion euro, or about 1.5 billion US dollars. Although, i do think that the free electron one will create much better x-rays (i couldn’t find any hard numbers for the ERL to compare to the FEL), the ERL does seem to perform much better then a normal synchrotron, at what appears to be practically the same price.

On a more personal note, i may not be able to write terribly frequently in the coming week, i have an exam coming up, my last one ever in fact, so i’ll have to study pretty hard to try and pass it. Quantum Information certainly is not easy stuff (Quantum computers/encryption/etc), but if i manage to get a decent handle on it and pass the exam, i might just write a short roundup about it, it’s quite fascinating really.