Hope Whitelock - Making the World's Most Expensive Light Bulb (3/10/20)

 Making the World's Most Expensive Light Bulb*

To watch a chemical reaction in real time, you usually need x-rays, which come from an expensive, inaccessible x-ray facility like a free electron laser or synchrotron. Most of those x-rays then get wasted and never make it to a detector. This makes x-ray experiments expensive, inconvenient, and just plain difficult. But what if we could do it on a table top? What if we could do it with just a light bulb? What if we could make detectors that caught all of the x-rays? In this talk, I’ll introduce how a fancy light bulb and a camera made of cold metal are going to change the future of ultrafast chemistry.

 Hope Whitelock

*okay there might be one or two that are more expensive.