Channeling Radiation as a Source of Hard X-rays with High Spectral Brilliance

Roentgen's discovery of X-rays in 1895 opened up a new window on the physical world. Beginning with Bragg's introduction of crystallography in 1912, Moseley's ordering of the chemical elements in 1913, and Compton's discovery of the momentum of a photon in 1923, much of what we've learned about physics, chemistry, and biology in the last century has been discovered using X-rays. X-rays are now an indispensable tool in materials science and protein crystallography. In medicine, too, we've progressed from Roentgen's first shadow images of the bones in his hand to 3-D computerized tomography.