Tabletop X-ray laser breakthrough

2010-02-23
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Research has shown that a tabletop X-ray laser with high-resolution imaging capabilities can become a reality in the near future.

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Research has shown that a tabletop X-ray laser with high-resolution imaging capabilities can become a reality in the near future.

Physics professors Margaret Murnane and Henry Kapteyn, from the University of Colorado at Boulder, have been researching X-rays for the past two decades. They have been able to generate coherent laser-like X-ray beams that could bring about a revolution in cost-effective beams, which can be very useful in understanding the nano-world.

The pair created the laser-like beams by using an intense femtosecond laser and combining hundreds or thousands of visible photons using a desktop-size system.

They generated laser-like X-ray beams in the soft X-ray region, which is the first step before extending the process into the hard X-ray region of the electromagnetic spectrum.

In an X-ray tube, an electron is boiled off a filament and then accelerated in an electric field before hitting a solid target. In this process, the electron's kinetic energy is converted into incoherent X-rays.

But in the tabletop setup, part of the quantum wave function of an electron is plucked from an atom using an intense laser pulse. The electron is then accelerated and slammed back into the ion, releasing its energy as an X-ray photon. The laser field controls the motion of the electron, which helps the emitted X-rays to retain coherence, Murnane said.

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