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An international research team led by the University of Colorado Boulder has generated the first laser-like beams of X-rays from a tabletop device, paving the way for major advances in many fields including medicine, biology and nanotechnology development.
For half a century, scientists have been trying to figure out how to build a cost-effective and reasonably sized X-ray laser that could, among other things, provide super-high-resolution imaging, according to Henry Kapteyn, a CU-Boulder physics professor and fellow at JILA, a joint institute of CU-Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Such a device also could be used by scientists to peer into a single cell or chemical reaction to gain a better understanding of the nanoworld.
Most of today鈥檚 X-ray lasers require so much power that they rely on facilities the size of football stadiums or larger, making their use impractical. To avoid the need for a large energy source to power an X-ray laser, the CU-Boulder researchers have created a tabletop device that uses atoms in a gas to efficiently combine more than 5,000 low-energy mid-infrared laser photons to generate each high-energy X-ray photon, said Margaret Murnane, a CU-Boulder physics professor and JILA fellow who is co-leading the research efforts.
鈥淏ecause X-ray wavelengths are 1,000 times shorter than visible light and they penetrate materials, these coherent X-ray beams promise revolutionary new capabilities for understanding and controlling how the nanoworld works on its fundamental time and length scales,鈥� Murnane said. 鈥淯nderstanding the nanoworld is needed to design and optimize next-generation electronics, data and energy storage devices and medical diagnostics.鈥�
The findings will appear June 8 in the journal Science.
The tabletop device -- an X-ray tube in the soft X-ray region -- produces a bright, directed beam of X-rays by ensuring that all of the atoms in a multi-atmosphere pressure gas emit X-rays, according to Kapteyn.
鈥淎s an added advantage, the X-rays emerge as very short bursts of light that can capture the fastest processes in our physical world, including imaging the motions of electrons,鈥� Kapteyn said.
Laser beams, which are visible light, represent one of the best ways to concentrate energy and have been a huge benefit to society by enabling the Internet, DVD players, laser surgery and a host of other uses.
鈥淗owever, the same revolution that happened for visible light sources that made it possible to create laser-like beams of light for widespread use instead of multidirectional light from a light bulb, is only now happening for X-rays,鈥� Kapteyn said.
Co-authors on the paper were Tenio Popmintchev, Ming-Chang Chen, Dimitar Popmintchev, Paul Arpin, Susannah Brown, Andreas Becker and Agnieszka Jaron-Becker of CU-Boulder; Skirmantas Alisauskas, Giedrius Andriukaitis, Tadas Balciunas, Oliver Mucke, Audrius Pugzlys and Andrius Baltuska of the Vienna University of Technology in Vienna; Bonggu Shim, Samuel E. Schrauth and Alexander Gaeta of Cornell University; and Carlos Hernandez-Garcia and Luis Plaja of the Universidad de Salamanca in Salamanca, Spain.
Contact:
Henry Kapteyn,听kapteyn@jila.colorado.edu
Margaret Murnane,听murnane@jila.colorado.edu听听
Greg Swenson, CU media relations, 303-492-3113
CU-Boulder physics professors and JILA fellows Henry Kapteyn and听Margaret Murnane stand next to one of their laser devices. (Photo by Glenn Asakawa/University of Colorado)
