We've talked about some basics on waves, now let's delve into some more practical uses. X-radiation (Xrays) range from 10nm to 10pm in wavelength. This is very useful to us, because that's about the size of atoms all the way down to the size of nuclei. This makes for a wonderful probe at the atomic scale. The energy of the xray light is E=h/λ, where λ is the wavelength. The shorter the wavelength, the higher the energy. There are two important ranges of this light: soft xrays when it is below 5 keV energy, and hard xrays when is above 5~10 keV energy. Hard xrays penetrate more because they are "smaller" and have higher energy. They pass through lighter atoms and interact with heavier ones preferentially. That's what they use at the doctors office to scan through your soft human parts and image your dense bones. They are very useful for probing materials such as crystal structures, like diamonds. Soft xrays interact with lighter atoms, and therefore ionize them them quite readily. This is very useful to probe molecules. We figure out what material something is by scanning across the energy of soft xrays. This can be used to tell the chemical energy of a material, a technique called spectroscopy. We use it to image reactions that occur in magnetic materials and can even produce full scale 3D models of the tiniest cells and membranes using techniques called tomography and microscopy. Pic related. There are three major interactions that occur when it comes to xrays: Photoelectric Absorbtion - where all the energy of the xray get's absorbed into the particle, usually an electron in one of the orbitals of an atom. I like to think of Mario absorbing a mushroom to become Super Mario. Because the electron now has energy, it might do some stuff and give off more light. Most soft xrays interact in this manner, and not much by the other two. Compton Scattering - when an xray knocks into a particle, typically an electron, and transfers some momentum around. Think of billiard balls, one knocks into the other and the both scatter off each other. The first ball loses some speed, the second ball gains some. But light can't lose speed, it always goes the speed of light... So instead, it loses frequency and lets a longer wavelength. Hard xrays do more of this. Rayleigh scattering - this one is the most complex, because it has to do with material dielectric properties and multipole moments. Light is an oscillating electric and magnetic field. As it passes by a charged particle, it will wiggle that particle and make it produce it's own light. This is why the sky is rich blue during normal daytime, you have light from the sun interacting with nitrogen and oxygen gas in the atmosphere. Thank you Nika for encouraging me to continue and write this tonight. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) Quiz for you readers: what is the fuzzy area called in between soft xrays and hard xrays?

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