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Fricking Laser Beams

X-Ray laser beams to boot! From the Max Planck Society website comes this press release: bq. X-rays have become laser-like Austrian-German research team demonstrates for the first time a source of coherent kiloelectronvolt X-rays, which promises extraordinary applications. bq. Radiologists and biologists have been dreaming - ever since the discovery of lasers - of a compact laboratory source emitting X-rays in one direction in a laser-like beam. Such a source would permit X-ray images to be recorded with far higher resolution at vastly reduced dose levels, allowing early-stage cancer diagnosis at dramatically reduced risk. Microscopes furnished with this source would make nanometer-sized biomolecules perceivable in their natural surrounding (in vivo). It may take many years before this dream comes true, but the experiment reported by an Austrian-German collaboration led by Ferenc Krausz indicates a promising way of realizing the dream some day. Researchers at Vienna University of Technology, the University of Würzburg, the University of Munich and Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics demonstrated the first source of laser-like X-rays at a wavelength of 1 nanometer with a compact laboratory apparatus [Nature 433, 596 (2005)] in an experiment in Vienna, funded by the Austrian Science Fund.

The purple light originates from helium atoms excited by intense laser light. The laser pulses propagate along the axis of the purple lobes (horizontally) through the helium gas, and the X-ray beam (not visible) is radiated in a beam several hundred micrometers in diameter in the same direction.

Very cool on a lot of different levels -- this will have use in Integrated Circuit manufacture as well as portable diagnostic equipment for forensics and chemical analysis (thinking spectroscopy here). I want one! Posted by DaveH at February 15, 2005 5:45 PM