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A team of National Science Foundation-funded physicists are seeing an everyday phenomenon in a new light. By focusing laser light to a brightness 1 billion times greater than the surface of the sun--the brightest light ever produced on Earth--the physicists have observed changes in a vision-enabling interaction between light and matter.
Those changes yielded unique X-ray pulses with the potential to generate extremely high-resolution imagery useful for medical, engineering, scientific and security purposes. The team’s findings should also help inform future experiments involving high-intensity lasers.Image credit: Donald Umstadter and Wenchao Yan
