Scientists Create World's First Atomic X-Ray Laser 145
New submitter newmission33 writes "Government researchers have created the fastest, purest X-ray laser pulses ever achieved, and have fulfilled a 1967 prediction that an atomic scale X-ray laser could be made in the same manner as visible-light lasers, according to a statement released Wednesday. Researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory used the Linac Coherent Light Source to aim a powerful X-ray source beam, a billion times brighter than any previous source, at a capsule of neon gas and triggered an 'avalanche' of X-ray emissions to become the world's first 'atomic X-ray laser.'"
is an xray pump laser truly needed? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't mean if this is useful or not, the article clearly states how it is.
I mean, the pump laser, the one that excites the lasing medium (in this case neon gas). Does it have to be x-ray?
Would a coherent beam of some other, more easily produced frequency, or even a highly charged cathode beam, be sufficient to induce the xray emission cascade as well?
Re:Not like a standard laser (Score:4, Interesting)
I can't think of any materials with which to create an xray mirror... not of sufficient quality anyway. Without some of those, and an xray beam splitter, you couldn't possibly self amplify...
If this were built on a very tiny scale, so that the neon atoms were all in a row (trap them inside a nanotube maybe?) Perahps a nanoscale version could be made directional? (Or at least have a directional bias)
Re:This (Score:5, Interesting)
Remember how fuzzy they were?
This badboy would make thoe pictures much, much clearer.
Actually, those pictures are fuzzy partly because the orbitals themselves are fuzzy. You probably can't get much more detail than that; the detail doesn't exist.
At any rate, X-rays interacting with a single molecule like this one would likely knock electrons right off of it, thereby disrupting the very thing you're trying to image. Crystal X-ray diffraction imaging doesn't have that problem because of the countless copies of molecules available.
Re:is an xray pump laser truly needed? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not like a standard laser (Score:4, Interesting)
The main LCLS X-ray laser also works without mirrors, but it has so much gain that the final beam is pretty close to transform limit in the transverse - almost a coherent as a conventional laser.
--- Joe Frisch
SLAC