* Astronomy

 Bright X-Ray Flashes Created in Laser Lab

A breakthrough in laser science was achieved in Vienna: In the labs of the Photonics Institute at the Vienna University of Technology, a new method of producing bright laser pulses at x-ray energies was developed. The radiation covers a broad energy spectrum and can therefore be used for a wide range of applications, from materials science to medicine. Up until now, similar kinds of radiation could only be produced in particle accelerators (synchrotrons), but now a laser laboratory can also achieve this. The new laser technology was presented in the current issue of the magazine "Science".
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An x-ray laser may sound like something you'd only find in a James Bond movie, but scientists have made the device a reality. Today, physicists at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, announced that they have coaxed test beams out of their Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), the first laser working at "hard" x-ray wavelengths. With further refinement, the LCLS might be able to determine the structure of a protein by blasting just a single molecule with its beam; it also might be able to squeeze matter to high pressures and temperatures to simulate conditions in the centers of planets.
X-rays are key to probing the atomic-scale structure of materials. In recent decades, physicists have built hugely intense x-ray sources that have been a boon to condensed matter physics, materials science, and structural biology. These sources rely on circular particle accelerators called synchrotrons; the particles circulating in them radiate x-ray photons as they whirl around. The LCLS could eventually be a billion times brighter than these sources. What's more, it will produce bona fide x-ray laser beams, meaning that all the photons in them will march in quantum-mechanical lockstep and give the beam especially useful properties.

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