The world's most powerful X-ray laser creates matter at 2 million degrees

U.S. and European researchers have directed powerful laser pulses to a small piece of aluminum foil to get what is known as "hot dense matter," a solid plasma wich reached a temperature of about 2 million degrees. The whole process took place in just a trillionth of a second, as published this week in Nature.

The experiments were carried out with a super X-ray laser pulses which are ultrafast billion times brighter than those achieved by any other of this type so far. It's Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) installed at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, a center operated by Stanford University for the U.S. Department of Energy.

"The LCLS is a truly remarkable machine," says Sam Vinko, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford (UK) and author of the paper. "Making hot dense matter is extremely important from a scientific point of view if in the long run helps us understand the conditions that exist inside the stars and in the center of the giant planets, both in our own solar system as beyond . "

"Until now scientists have succeeded in creating the plasma from gases and studying it with common lasers," said another author, Bob Nagler, SLAC, "but there was no tool that would allow to do the same with solid densities can not be penetrated by conventional lasers."

"The LCLS, with its wavelength X-ray is the first tool that can penetrate a dense solid and create a 'patch' uniform plasma -in this case a cube of a thousandth of a centimeter- and try the same time, "says Nagler.

Outcome measures will be incorporated into the theories and computer simulations dealing with explaining the behavior of hot dense matter. This could help researchers to analyze and recreate the nuclear fusion process that starts stars like the Sun