Inside a two-mile long particle accelerator

able to harness all of that light and focus it into a very very small spot precision is everything takes an entire team working 24 7 to ensure the undulators are perfectly tuned the entire beam goes through here with five micron precision and so that's five microns out of the 130 meter length of this undulator hall and so you know better than a part per million in terms of precision and alignment probably one of the straightest objects in the world like other parts of slack undulator hall gets an upgrade for lcls2 its original line of magnets is replaced by two separate lines the line on the right generates hard x-rays those are x-rays with shorter wavelengths that can probe smaller structures particularly useful in material and biological sciences the line on the left generates soft x-rays with longer wavelengths which scientists can use to study energy and chemical reactions and now that we've got our x-rays scientists further down the line can make those molecular movies i'm going to jump up and down and be so excited we're gonna enable experiments that i've been wanting to do for years and years dr kryon works in what's known as near experimental hall

our next stop on the line this facility is broken up into four main areas known as hutches this one has some kind of cool stuff in it if we can duck in here real quick within these hutches scientists can swap out different experiments related to everything from molecular and atomic physics to biology and this is where the lcl s2 and its 1 million pulses per second become a game changer it's such a higher rep rate that we'll all of a sudden take experiments that we say that's not feasible and say it's doable and it's doable in a matter of days this ability to observe processes on different time scales will open up new doors for scientific research allowing scientists to answer questions they've been trying to solve for years how does energy transfer happen inside molecular systems how does charge transfer happen once we understand some of these principles we can start to apply them to understand how can we do artificial photosynthesis how can we better understand photovoltaic devices how can we build better solar cells i think it's absolutely fair to say that lcls2 will usher in a new era of science

all right so this is it we've finally reached the last stop of this incredibly long x-ray laser this is called feh or far experimental haul they're also running some experiments here and we're gonna go take a look at the very end of lcls you'll find four more hutches these ones are color coded and more fancy acronyms this is mfx which is the macromolecular femtosecond crystallography hutch and here we look at proteins viruses biological material in air this is really cool behind me there's four lasers in here now those lasers generate beams that are directed through there's a series of optics right there that you can see after getting directed through those optics they pass through this black tube here into this chamber also known as the mec or matter and extreme condition hutch

now in that chamber the scientists can use those lasers to simulate all sorts of extreme conditions anything from the core of the earth to the surface of the sun after generating these extreme conditions researchers use x-rays from lcls to capture images of how materials inside the chamber react in those exact moments we can focus on planetary interiors we can focus on impact or collision events so maybe the moon forming impact simulation we're generating high density plasmas much like our in the the interior of stars and we can watch what is happening on a very short time scale to these very hot dense plasmas

we also focus on a portfolio of material science applications so considering materials at extreme conditions what happens to the surface of a re-entry vehicle while most scientists at slack are eagerly awaiting the activation of lcls2 scientists here at feh are looking even further into the future often referred to as the upgrade to the upgrade lcls2 high energy is a project that will expand energy reach on the new line it means we can penetrate deeper into samples we can look at more complicated materials think about the earth's core made of iron in total the upgrade for lc ls2 runs about a billion dollars now

in just a couple weeks scientists are hoping to cool down those cryo modules that we saw earlier and then produce their first electron beam with lcl s2 then in summer of 2022 hopefully their first x-ray which they'll call their first big light event that's going to be just in time for the 60th anniversary of slack