Download or read book Reviews of Accelerator Science and Technology - Volume 3 written by Alex Chao and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2010 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Each generation yielded growths in brightness and time resolution that were unimaginable just a few years earlier. In particular, the progression from the 3rd to 4th generation is a true revolution; the peak brilliance of coherent soft and hard x-rays has increased by 7-10 orders of magnitude, and the image resolution has reached the angstrom (1 [symbol] = 10-10 meters) and femto-second (1 fs = 10-15 second) scales. These impressive capabilities have fostered fundamental scientific advances and led to an explosion of numerous possibilities in many important research areas including material science, chemistry, molecular biology and the life sciences. Even more remarkably, this field of photon source invention and development shows no signs of slowing down. Studies have already been started on the next generation of x-ray sources, which would have a time resolution in the atto-second (1 as = 10-18 second) regime, comparable to the time of electron motion inside atoms.