Speaker
Description
Synchrotron radiation is a gigantic worldwide enterprise serving tens of thousands of users. With more than fifty operating facilities and several more underway, its research produced so far more than 300,000 publications and several Nobel prizes. However, synchrotron radiation is also widely considered a complicated phenomenon, difficult to understand for non-specialists. But this is far from the truth: over the years, we developed an extreme relativistic description that explains its properties in very simple terms and with minimal formalism. The characteristics so presented include the spectral range, flux, collimation, brightness, time structure, polarization and coherence. Similarly simple are the descriptions of the main applications, including imaging, absorption and photoemission spectroscopy and structural techniques. The approach is also extended to x-ray free electron lasers and their novel applications.