New research suggests it is possible to generate ultra-short X-ray pulses using current technology, and the feat could provide insight into the fastest events in physics.
Computer simulations of a technique called Raman amplification suggests short-duration X-ray flashes that last a thousandth of a billionth of a second could be compressed down to only a millionth of a billionth of a second, the University of Oxford reported.
"X-ray pulses from free electron lasers are being used in a whole host of ways, from biomedical technology and work on superconductors to research into proteins and states of matter in dense planets," said James Sadler, a second-year DPhil student and lead author of the paper.
The researchers demonstrated it would be possible to scale down these flashes by a factor of a hundred or a thousand, which would mean they would occur faster than it takes for a chemical reaction to occur. This breakthrough would have a wide range of applications in numerous scientific fields.
"A good analogy might be those natural history [programs] on TV. When you see, for example, a bird in flight captured by an ultra-fast camera, you can see all the beautiful intricacies that can't be picked up by the naked eye or conventional technology," said Peter Norreys, Principal Investigator of the project. "By reducing the pulse length of these x-rays by another order of magnitude - in effect, quickening the "shutter speed" - we can make a number of scientific processes much clearer."
The processes include some of the shortest events in physics, such as electron movement in atoms. Now, the researchers hope to accomplish the predicted outcome under laboratory settings.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Scientific Reports.
