“It was a thrill of a lifetime for guys like me,” says John Galayda about this spring’s smooth startup of SLAC’s free-electron laser, the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), whose construction he oversees. “Accelerator guys thought it would be less trouble to lase at 15 Å, and that we would struggle at shorter wavelengths. As it turned out, we lased at 1.5 Å on the first attempt.” The secret to success? “A jillion things had to be done exactly right.”
“It’s very rare that you turn on something of this complexity and it just works. It annihilated our expectations,” says SLAC director Persis Drell. People expected it would take months to optimize the LCLS. “Some 112 meters of undulators, which generate the fields that accelerate electrons so they emit x rays, had to be aligned to 5 microns,” says Drell. “The electron beam had to be high quality, with low...
