Synchrotron Light Facilities and Applications in Life Sciences

The synchrotron radiation emitted by high-energy ultrarelativistic electrons is one of the most powerful tools for investigating matter. The radiation has a broad continuum spectrum covering radiation wavelengths from infrared to hard X-ray ranges. The radiation is emitted in a narrow cone providing a high brilliance collimated photon beam with a small divergence and size from a high intensity electron source. The continuous spectrum of synchrotron radiation provides more than five orders of magnitude increase in intensity and more than ten orders of magnitude increase in brilliance than more conventional sources, such as VUV lamps and X-ray tubes. In advanced synchrotron light facilities the radiation is produced in bending magnets, undulators and wigglers, enabling dedicated tunable polarized photon beams. The radiation has a pulsed time structure allowing the execution of time-resolved experiments along with scattering, spectroscopy and imaging experiments. These features of synchrotron light have provided a continuous growth of synchrotron radiation usage in diverse fields of life, materials and environmental sciences during the last decades. In this chapter, a brief introduction is provided to synchrotron light sources, the main features of their associated radiation, experimental techniques and applications in life sciences.