Physicists Control X-Ray Beams With Laser Light
By changing the material medium through which x-rays pass, physicists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have used laser light to control x-ray beams. As a new generation of powerful light sources comes online, intense x-ray beams may be able to control matter directly and allow one beam of x-rays to control another, the new Nature Physics study suggests. Using the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Advanced Light Source femtosecond spectroscopy beamline 6.0.2, researchers sent ultrashort pulses of laser light and higher-frequency x-rays together through a gas cell filled with pressurized neon. Excited by the laser pulses, the gas, which normally absorbs x-rays, became transparent to the x-ray pulses during their quick passage. read more