BEIJING: Over the past 75 years, China’s development of key scientific facilities has advanced in leaps and bounds, most notably in the past several decades as the Chinese economy and technological capacity have accelerated at great speed.
A key component of these facilities has been technologies that have enabled Chinese scientists to look deeper and deeper into the unknown.
Light allows us to see objects, while X-rays help us see the essence of things. X-rays with higher brightness can allow us to “see” the microstructures inside materials more clearly. Therefore, obtaining X-ray light sources with higher brightness is a goal tirelessly pursued by scientists. “The synchrotron radiation light source that produces high-brightness X-rays is like a super microscope that helps researchers see what is happening inside materials at the molecular and atomic levels,” said Tai Renzhong, vice-president of the Shanghai Advanced Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The brightness of X-rays from synchrotron radiation can be billions of times higher than ordinary X-rays. By using such light for experiments, scientists have been able to better understand approximately 70 percent of the known biological macromolecular structures in the world such as proteins, DNA and viruses. –The Daily Mail-China Daily news exchange item
