Properties




X-ray photons carry enough energy to ionize atoms and disrupt molecular bonds. This makes it a type of ionizing radiation, and therefore harmful to living tissue. A very high radiation dose over a short period of time causes radiation sickness, while lower doses can give an increased risk of radiation-induced cancer. In medical imaging this increased cancer risk is generally greatly outweighed by the benefits of the examination. The ionizing capability of X-rays can be utilized in cancer treatment to kill malignant cells using radiation therapy. It is also used for material characterization using X-ray spectroscopy.

Hard X-rays can traverse relatively thick objects without being much absorbed or scattered. For this reason, X-rays are widely used to image the inside of visually opaque objects. The most often seen applications are in medical radiography and airport security scanners, but similar techniques are also important in industry (e.g. industrial radiography and industrial CT scanning) and research (e.g. small animal CT). The penetration depth varies with several orders of magnitude over the X-ray spectrum. This allows the photon energy to be adjusted for the application so as to give sufficient transmission through the object and at the same time provide good contrast in the image.

X-rays have much shorter wavelengths than visible light, which makes it possible to probe structures much smaller than can be seen using a normal microscope. This property is used in X-ray microscopy to acquire high resolution images, and also in X-ray crystallography to determine the positions of atoms in crystals.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Units of measure and exposure

The measure of X-rays ionizing ability is called the exposure: The coulomb per kilogram (C/kg) is the SI unit of ionizing radiation exposure, and it is the amount of radiation required to create one coulomb of charge of each polarity in one kilogram of matter. The roentgen (R) is an obsolete traditional unit of exposure, which represented the amount of radiation required to create one electrostatic unit of charge of each polarity in one cubic centimeter of dry air. 1 roentgen= 2.58×10−4 C/kg. However, the effect of ionizing radiation on matter (especially living tissue) is more closely related to the amount of energy deposited into them rather than the charge generated. This measure of energy absorbed is called the absorbed dose: The gray (Gy), which has units of (joules/kilogram), is the SI unit of absorbed dose, and it is the amount of radiation required to deposit one joule of energy in one kilogram of any kind of matter. The rad is the (obsolete) corresponding traditional unit, e
Read more

Other uses

Image
Other notable uses of X-rays include: X-ray crystallography in which the pattern produced by the diffraction of X-rays through the closely spaced lattice of atoms in a crystal is recorded and then analysed to reveal the nature of that lattice. In the early 1990s, experiments were done in which layers a few atoms thick of two different materials were deposited in a Thue-Morse sequence. The resulting object was found to yield X-ray diffraction patterns. A related technique, fiber diffraction, was used by Rosalind Franklin to discover the double helical structure of DNA. X-ray astronomy, which is an observational branch of astronomy, which deals with the study of X-ray emission from celestial objects. X-ray microscopic analysis, which uses electromagnetic radiation in the soft X-ray band to produce images of very small objects. X-ray fluorescence, a technique in which X-rays are generated within a specimen and detected. The outgoing energy of the X-ray can be used to identify the compo
Read more