Bright stuff: LCLS ready to shine

Stanford’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) is an X-ray free-electron laser that produces X-ray pulses more than a billion times brighter than the next brightest synchrotron sources. As atomic physicist Phil Bucksbaum explains, LCLS is also “the world’s first laser able to interrogate atoms and molecules simultaneously on their natural time scale and length scale”.