The X-rays are produced by the MXISystems machine by crashing electrons head-on into intense laser light beams. These machines are built in such a way that they can be used without significant modification for many different things, such as diagnosing disease, treating cancers, and X-raying industrial processes. An additional benefit of the way in which the X-rays are made is that they create a picture in a few trillionths of a second, so that patient motion or movement of the insides of a rocket engine are not a problem when imaging. The X-rays seem to emanate from a very tiny point in space that is about ½ to ¼ the size of a human hair, so extremely small things can be imaged with very high accuracy.

The process uses a near-relativistic electron beam of approximately 1 nC of charge accelerated to anywhere from 12-55 MeV and then focused down to a 20-50 micron focal spot. A Green light beam from a tabletop terawatt laser is then counter-propagated against the electron beam in a 180-degree geometry also focused to the same sized focal spot. The green photons are Doppler shifted by the inverse Compton process to X-ray energies. Hence a green photon goes in and an X-ray comes out. X-rays are generated in a somewhat slowly diverging conebeam along the axis and in the direction traveled by the electron beam, exiting the machine through a beryllium window for various applications. The X-ray photons produced have energies of 8-100 keV in fluxes of 10⁹ photons per 8 picosecond “shot”, or 10¹⁰ photons/second.

Over the last two years, our base machine has decreased significantly in size, along with a reduction in cost, yet the efficiency of X-ray production has increased by 1000X. Images, for example, can now be performed 10 times a second, rather than one image every six minutes.