Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the U.S. Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory(at Stanford University), and others have created what they describe as “the first attosecond atomic x-ray laser”.
In a new study published in Nature, the researchers describe how they focused a short, powerful x-ray input pulse – with power equivalent to focusing all the sunlight that hits the Earth into a one square millimeter target – onto copper and manganese targets. Depending on how the laser was configured, some of the resulting x-ray laser pulses lasted less than 100 attoseconds.
The joint statement by Wisconsin-Madison and SLAC said, “Perhaps as significant, this new x-ray laser operates more like a conventional laser than other existing x-ray lasers, potentially opening the door to applications studying the fastest processes in nature. The results hold promise for quantum computing, atomic clocks, and developing laser technology to study medical and materials science at the atomic level.”
Read the full story here: https://optics.org/news/16/6/20