Advanced Light Source Special Colloquium
April 27, 2015

Speaker: Janos Kirz

Abstract: Röntgen's great discovery became an instant public sensation. Fascination with the "new kind of rays" that could reveal the structure of opaque objects swept the world in 1896. Fifty years later it was widely recognized that the short wavelength of the radiation should open the world of microscopy far beyond what one could achieve with visible light. For crystals, techniques for imaging molecular structure at atomic resolution, were developed quite rapidly. Beyond crystals it took over 100 years for x-ray sources, optics, detectors and analysis methods to mature for x-ray microscopy to become a widely used technique. I shall trace some events from this long journey, and the rapidly accelerating progress in the field.