Lloyd Rees Memorial Lecture by Professor Keith Nugent

Thursday 6 October, 2016 at 2.30 pm at the Wark Theatre at CSIRO Manufacturing

Sources of the energetic form of light known as X-rays are developing at an enormous rate. Indeed, by one measure, they are improving at a rate that exceeds computing’s famous Moore’s Law.

The rapid improvement of synchrotron sources has driven a very significant part of this growth over the last few decades, but the already dizzying rate of development has recently been accelerated by the construction of X-Ray Free Electron Lasers (XFELS), with the first beginning operation in the USA in 2011. XFELS are now either operating or under construction in a number of countries around the world.

XFELS are based on linear accelerator technology and are able to produce pulses of X-Rays that can be up to ten orders of magnitude brighter than the pulses from modern synchrotrons. This extraordinary growth in capability is certain to unlock new scientific insights and new technologies. In this talk, Professor Nugent will describe the physics underpinning X-Ray Free Electron Lasers. He will go on to outline some of the scientific drivers behind the significant global investment in X-Ray lasers, with the most important being the possibility of imaging a single biomolecule. He will describe his progress towards these scientific goals.

Light refreshments available after the Lecture.

About the speaker

Professor Keith Nugent FAA is internationally recognised for his outstanding contributions to Chemical Physics. As Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coherent X-Ray Science from 2005 to 2013 he has driven the development of coherent X-Ray diffraction methods for imaging biological structures. His other important contribution to Chemical Physics focuses on the complete recovery of phase from intensity and the applications of this to imaging