Europe's new X-ray eye sees 1,000 times sharper - experiments that took hours now take minutes

At BESSY II, Germany's synchrotron light source - a giant machine that makes ultra-bright X-ray light for peering inside materials - a new instrument just switched on. Built by researchers from Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin, the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion and the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, the superconducting X-ray spectrometer catches X-ray photons 100 to 1,000 times more efficiently than conventional detectors, making it the only instrument of its kind at a European synchrotron. Measurements that once ate entire afternoons can now finish in minutes, opening the door to studying atomically thin sheets, nanoscale structures and vanishingly dilute molecules that were previously out of reach.