published in the journal Nature<\/a>, reports the observation of two hallmark nonlinear optical phenomena: Rabi cycling and filamentation, not in optical light but at hard x-rays with angstrom (0.1-nm) wavelengths. These effects, known within microwave to visible light laser systems, have now been observed within the x-ray regime during stimulated emission of copper (Cu) and manganese (Mn) inner-shell transitions pumped with highly intense x-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) pulses at the\u00a0Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in the U.S. and the SPring-8 angstrom Compact Free Electron Laser (SACLA) in Japan. The researchers find that these effects can lead to the generation of x-ray pulses with durations shorter than 100 attoseconds. What was created was the first attosecond atomic x-ray laser and the shortest hard x-ray pulses to date.<\/p>\nThis research demonstrates how traditional nonlinear methods used at optical wavelengths can be extended to 3,000x shorter x-ray wavelengths, opening possibilities for new attosecond x-ray research with atomic spatial resolution. The resulting pulses can lead to several potential applications, from quantum x-ray optics to visualizing electron motion inside molecules.<\/p>\n
A surprise result<\/p>\n
The observation of both strong lasing phenomena was not the original goal of the work with the experimental team first studying how to use stimulated x-ray emission for chemical speciation of transition metal compounds like manganese. While investigating these samples, the researchers saw multiple hotspots and random spurting in the stimulated emission, where a narrow signal was expected.<\/p>\n
When increasing the XFEL intensity, the team started to observe additional large spectral broadening and peak splitting, much larger than possible based on their knowledge of Mn and Cu inner-shell transitions. It took them several years to identify and verify their findings. A breakthrough occurred when a recently developed three-dimensional (3D) simulation was coded to simulate the experimental conditions, rigorously showing the causes of the observed spectra.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ultrafast lasers are essential to a multitude of science and industrial applications ranging from semiconductor lithography to fundamental…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":192537,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[445],"tags":[49,48,635,82],"class_list":["post-192536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-cycling","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192536"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192536\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/192537"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}