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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Can this be used to generate soft X-rays, aka "extreme ultraviolet"? You can do that with a synchrotron or a big linear accelerator, but it hasn't been cost effective. A smaller accelerator could replace the vaporized-tin hack ASML uses as a light source.

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It's a bit much to call it a "hack". ASML & collaborators have created an EUV source that works at the scale needed to mass manufacture chips. It's not something held together with duct tape. Yeah maybe a little accelerator is theoretically elegant, but some among the thousands of engineers and scientists that have worked on their EUV probably considered that.

To add to this, here is a great video on some of the technical/physical challenges ASML had to solve for their EUV source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ge2RcvDlgw

People have built free electron lasers to make EUV. I’ve seen them for sale.

To generate soft x-rays/UV you don't really need an accelerator, since high voltage (not that high actually, since required kilovolts can easily be achieved) is enough to produce photons of those energies.

Vaporization you mention is likely because of electrons hitting the material, since in any case to emit photons electrons need to be slowed down. Either electrical potential difference in a vacuum chamber or an actual accelerator is being used, the material to brake electrons will evaporate anyway.

Actually generating x-rays is easy. Every dentist office has a "high-luminosity" x-ray generator

But x-rays are too short-wave for EUV. Maybe they have considered some form of down-conversion from x-rays for EUV but at those wavelengths it's not very trivial.

That's one of the applications, yes, compact x-ray source with smaller source size.

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