Credit: Fivos Perakis/Stockholm University
An illustration shows the “blurring” effect caused by water molecules moving during imaging with the X-ray laser. As the laser pulse gets longer, from left to right, the diffraction pattern produced by X-rays hitting the molecules changes (bottom row), reflecting the motion of the water molecules (top row). Experiments at SLAC’s LCLS X-ray laser were able to provide the timescale of the water dynamics by using pulses less than 100 millionths of a billionths of a second long.