SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
Physicists Squeeze X-Ray Laser Light Out of Atoms
from ScienceNOW Daily News
Two years ago, physicists fired up the world's first laser to shine out hard x-rays--the high-energy, short-wavelength particles of light needed to probe
atomic-scale structure. Shining 10 billion times brighter than any previous x-ray source, the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) can determine the structure
of crystals from samples a few nanometers across and probe changes in materials that take place in a millionth of a nanosecond.
But the $410 million LCLS doesn't look anything like a laser pointer, as it relies on a 3-kilometer-long particle accelerator to generate x-rays. Now,
physicists have made a much smaller x-ray laser that works much more like the conventional one you might carry around in your pocket.
The new atomic x-ray laser won't replace the LCLS and other accelerator-based systems. In fact, to make the atomic laser work, researchers blasted neon
atoms with x-rays from the LCLS itself. Still, the results mark a conceptual triumph, fulfilling a 45-year-old prediction that such an atomic x-ray laser is
possible. "Nobody had done this before, and everybody knew that somebody had to go out and do this," says Philip Bucksbaum, director of SLAC's PULSE
Institute for Ultrafast Energy Science in Menlo Park, California, who was not involved in the work. "So this is great."
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