 Hi everyone in the last video we covered off on how x-rays are produced when you have an anode which shoots electrons they go across an evacuated tube and hit a target and as the electrons have crossed the tube they've done so through an electric field and they have accelerated and gained kinetic energy when they hit the target they slow down that change in energy is expressed predominantly as heat but in a sufficient amount as x-rays and it is that x-radiation those photons of x-ray white that can be used for different purposes today I'm like to talk about the the graph of general radiation which comes out of an x-ray tube it's got a common name which is breaking radiation because it is the electron slowing down however it's known through the physics term Bromstr along with the general graph that you'll see has an intensity on the y-axis and an energy on the x-axis and the shape is kind of like a skew if bell curve there's some lines shooting up and they're the characteristic radiation peaks so we'll go through that in greater detail but what you should see there is that the graph starts at relatively low level of energy and it will increase in the energy of the photons as you go across to the right and as you go across to the right you'll note that it also increases intensity at certain energy levels and there's a whole range of different energies there until it gets to one particular point which is here this is your f max that's the maximum frequency of x-rays that are going to be produced that's the maximum energy of x-ray that's going to be produced that comes from when an electron crosses the evacuated tube and slams into a tungsten nucleus or some nucleus in the metal target and all of its kinetic energy is then transferred into an x-ray for everything back towards the origin of the graph you've got electrons that have slowed down but not totally stopped and as a result you're getting a range of different energies the characteristic radiation peaks relate to something quite interesting if you've ever done any work with spectrometers you'll see that when you look at a fluorescent tube and you look at white light it doesn't look white it's got specific lines of color which relate to the visible spectrum energy transitions specific to the elements within the tubes every element has set energy levels that electrons orbit at now in the case of using a tungsten target tungsten has in itself set energy levels when you start firing high energy electrons at a tungsten target every now and again one electron will strike another in one of the lower orbits and in doing so it'll leave a hole in its lower orbit now if there's one thing that elements don't like it's a hole created of an electron in a lower orbital when you've got electrons available at higher orbitals so as soon as that occurs an electron from a higher orbital in the metal element will drop and occupy that position in the lower orbital and in doing so that specific drop it produces a specific amount of energy and does this in the form of an x-ray and what you're looking at there are some characteristic drops that occur with the metal target itself so that's where those characteristic peaks come from and those characteristic peaks align with the electron orbitals specific to the target element if you were to change the element that is the target the type of metal and you would change the location of the characteristic radiation peaks the x-ray peaks because the orbitals have changed and therefore the energy levels have changed so the key thing is with any x-ray graph the characteristic radiation peaks will always stay in the same location when it is the same target metal I'm going to go into how the intensity and the maximum frequency changes in the next few videos