Journal
NATURE
Volume 481, Issue 7382, Pages 488-491Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/nature10721
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Funding
- US Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) [DE-AC52-07NA27344]
- LLNL's LDRD [09-LW-044]
- US Department of Energy Basic Energy Sciences AMOS
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Since the invention of the laser more than 50 years ago, scientists have striven to achieve amplification on atomic transitions of increasingly shorter wavelength(1-7). The introduction of X-ray free-electron lasers(8-10) makes it possible to pump new atomic X-ray lasers(11-13) with ultrashort pulse duration, extreme spectral brightness and full temporal coherence. Here we describe the implementation of an X-ray laser in the kiloelectronvolt energy regime, based on atomic population inversion and driven by rapid K-shell photo-ionization using pulses from an X-ray free-electron laser. We established a population inversion of the K alpha transition in singly ionized neon(14) at 1.46 nanometres (corresponding to a photon energy of 849 electronvolts) in an elongated plasma column created by irradiation of a gas medium. We observed strong amplified spontaneous emission from the end of the excited plasma. This resulted in femtosecond-duration, high-intensity X-ray pulses of much shorter wavelength and greater brilliance than achieved with previous atomic X-ray lasers. Moreover, this scheme provides greatly increased wavelength stability, monochromaticity and improved temporal coherence by comparison with present-day X-ray free-electron lasers. The atomic X-ray lasers realized here may be useful for high-resolution spectroscopy and nonlinear X-ray studies.
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