Imagine walking into the main building of ELETTRA: several beamlines receive X-rays and many different experiments are underway. Synchrotron light, in fact, can be exploited in many different ways.
We first visit the SuperESCA beamline: X-rays bombard a material and cause the ejection of some of its electrons.
Before being ejected, each electron belonged to one of the atoms of the material; after ejection, its direction and speed are still reminescent of the atom properties. Specifically, they can reveal what is the corresponding chemical element, and how it is chemically bound to its neighbours. Thus, by analysing the ejected electron the SuperESCA beamline probes the chemical characteristics of the material surface, finding out what determines its properties and how these can be improved for practical applications. This technique - photoelectron spectroscopy - is well known: its foundations were established by Einstein, and its practical implementation started in the 1950's. But the SuperESCA beamline offers something quite new: the synchrotron light source is so powerful that, instead of taking static chemical pictures, one can take sequences of fast snapshots: chemical movies showing the real-time evolution of chemical reactions. This is not only great for fundamental research, but also for practical problems. The integrity of a car body, for example, depends on surface chemical reactions, e.g., metal deposition and rustproofing. The SuperESCA chemical movies can analyse these processes, assisting us in avoiding mistakes and improving the results.