Present and Future Accelerator-Based X-ray Sources: A Perspective

Accelerator-based X-ray sources have contributed uniquely to the physical, engineering and life sciences. There has been a constant development of the sources themselves as well as of the necessary X-ray optics and detectors. These advances have combined to push X-ray science to the forefront in structural studies, achieving atomic resolution for complex protein molecules, to meV scale dynamics addressing problems ranging from geoscience to high-temperature superconductors, and to spatial resolutions approaching 10[Formula: see text]nm for elemental mapping as well as three-dimensional structures. Here we discuss accelerator-based photon science in the frame of imaging and highlight the importance of optics, detectors and computation/data science as well as the source technology. We look to a bright future for X-ray systems, integrating all components from accelerator sources to digital image production algorithms, and highlight aspects that make them unique scientific tools.