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ScienceDaily (July 27, 2009) Oxford scientists have created a transparent form of aluminium by bombarding the metal with the worlds most powerful soft X-ray laser. Transparent aluminium previously only existed in science fiction, featuring in the movie Star Trek IV, but the real material is an exotic new state of matter with implications for planetary science and nuclear fusion.
The discovery was made possible with the development of a new source of radiation that is ten billion times brighter than any synchrotron in the world (such as the UKs Diamond Light Source). The FLASH laser, based in Hamburg, Germany, produces extremely brief pulses of soft X-ray light, each of which is more powerful than the output of a power plant that provides electricity to a whole city.
The Oxford team, along with their international colleagues, focused all this power down into a spot with a diameter less than a twentieth of the width of a human hair. At such high intensities the aluminium turned transparent.
Whilst the invisible effect lasted for only an extremely brief period an estimated 40 femtoseconds it demonstrates that such an exotic state of matter can be created using very high power X-ray sources.
Professor Wark added: What is particularly remarkable about our experiment is that we have turned ordinary aluminium into this exotic new material in a single step by using this very powerful laser. For a brief period the sample looks and behaves in every way like a new form of matter. In certain respects, the way it reacts is as though we had changed every aluminium atom into silicon: its almost as surprising as finding that you can turn lead into gold with light!
The researchers believe that the new approach is an ideal way to create and study such exotic states of matter and will lead to further work relevant to areas as diverse as planetary science, astrophysics and nuclear fusion power.
A report of the research, Turning solid aluminium transparent by intense soft X-ray photoionization, is published in Nature Physics. The research was carried out by an international team led by Oxford University scientists Professor Justin Wark, Dr Bob Nagler, Dr Gianluca Gregori, William Murphy, Sam Vinko and Thomas Whitcher.
Transparent aluminium is ?new state of matter? - University of Oxford
Transparent Aluminum Is ‘New State Of Matter’
Sounds pretty goddamn cool
