Scientists shrink electron gun to matchbox size

22 November, 2016

In a multi-national effort, an interdisciplinary team of researchers from DESY and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has built a new kind of electron gun that is just about the size of a matchbox. Electron guns are used in science to generate high-quality beams of electrons for the investigation of various materials, from biomolecules to superconductors. They are also the electron source for linear particle accelerators driving X-ray free-electron lasers. The team of DESY scientist Franz Kärtner, who is also a professor at University of Hamburg and continues to run a research group at MIT, where he taught till 2010 before coming to Hamburg, presents its new electron gun in the scientific journal Optica.