FLASH

FLASH, acronym of Free Electron LASer in Hamburg, is a superconducting particle accelerator-based soft X-ray free-electron laser located at the German national laboratory DESY in Hamburg, Germany. It can generate very powerful, ultrashort pulses (~10−14 s) of coherent radiation in the energy range from 10 eV (electronvolt) to 300 eV. It started operation for external users in the year 2005 and is used for surface, molecular and atomic physics experiments. Intended applications are also the imaging of single biological complex molecules with time resolution.