Goverment researchers are created fastest,purest x-ray laser pulse.The new atomic x-ray laser fulfills a 1967 prediction  that X-ray lasers could be made in the same manner as many visible-light lasers – by inducing electrons to fall from higher to lower energy levels within atoms, releasing a single color of light in the process. But until 2009, when LCLS turned on, no X-ray source was  powerful enough to create this type of laser.

Picture shows that:-Light Source comes up from the lower-left corner (shown as green) and hits a neon atom (center). This intense incoming light energizes an electron from an inner orbit (or shell) closest to the neon nucleus (center, brown), knocking it totally out of the atom (upper-left, foreground).

To make the atom laser, LCLS’s powerful X-ray pulses – each a billion times brighter than any available before  knocked electrons out of the inner shells of many of the neon atoms in the capsule. When other electrons fell in to fill the holes, about one in 50 atoms responded by emitting a photon in the X-ray range, which has a very short wavelength. Those X-rays then stimulated neighboring neon atoms to emit more X-rays, creating a domino effect that amplified the laser light 200 million times.

The atomic laser’s pulses are only one-eighth as long and their color is much more pure  qualities, say the researchers, that will enable it to illuminate and distinguish details of ultrafast reactions that have been impossible to see before.