Bright Light Rocks Harder: Creates Amazing Light Show

Donald Umstadter Author

07/19/2017 Added

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Recent research results from the Extreme Light Laboratory with super-bright laser light.

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[00:00:00.637](upbeat music)
[00:00:12.850]In recent experiments
[00:00:14.305]we observed unusual interactions
[00:00:16.465]between super-bright light and matter.
[00:00:19.750]Our laser produces short bursts of light.
[00:00:22.296]Each light pulse has more power than a trillion light bulbs.
[00:00:26.392]Despite its high power
[00:00:28.009]our laser is small enough to fit in a university laboratory.
[00:00:33.255]On a tour of our lab you can see students
[00:00:35.628]and scientists working with state-of-the-art lasers.
[00:00:39.979]When focused, the laser light is a billion times brighter
[00:00:42.902]than at the surface of the sun.
[00:00:45.454]With the super-bright light we studied light scattering,
[00:00:48.296]one of the most fundamental processes
[00:00:50.167]in all of nature.
[00:00:51.483]By making the world visible
[00:00:52.958]it is essential to life.
[00:00:54.811]without scattering the world would appear dark as night
[00:00:57.816]even on the sunniest of days.
[00:01:01.555]In scattering with normal light
[00:01:03.388]a single particle of light, a photon,
[00:01:05.671]collides with a single particle of matter, an electron.
[00:01:08.886]The collision shakes the electron
[00:01:10.848]which causes it to emit a new photon.
[00:01:13.435]With super-bright light
[00:01:14.593]hundreds of laser photons scatter simultaneously
[00:01:17.841]with each electron.
[00:01:19.317]The resulting figure eight electron quiver motion
[00:01:22.020]generates a higher energy photon
[00:01:24.575]with novel characteristics.
[00:01:26.904]Because we could generate the brightest light,
[00:01:29.244]we were able to confirm
[00:01:30.533]these decades-old theoretical predictions experimentally.
[00:01:34.796]For instance, when we increase the brightness
[00:01:37.195]of the laser light,
[00:01:38.054]we found that the shape of the scattered beam changed
[00:01:40.941]from circular to elliptical
[00:01:43.126]in agreement with theory.
[00:01:45.496]To make the experiment succeed,
[00:01:47.581]students and scientists align the light
[00:01:50.102]and electron beams with an accuracy
[00:01:52.365]of a millionth of a meter.
[00:01:54.762]Scattering of super-bright light
[00:01:56.590]also occurs naturally,
[00:01:58.234]not on earth but in the cosmos
[00:02:00.357]during supernova explosions of massive stars.
[00:02:09.166]The x-rays we produce can measure the quality
[00:02:11.599]of nano-scale computer chips.
[00:02:13.845]We took an x-ray of this USB drive.
[00:02:16.182]It clearly shows the detailed circuitry
[00:02:18.782]even though the chip was inside a plastic cover.
[00:02:22.220]Our technique might eventually allow us
[00:02:24.556]to make action movies staring atoms.
[00:02:28.232]And here are some of our team.
[00:02:33.452]Thanks for watching
[00:02:34.572]and stay tuned for news of future experiments
[00:02:37.073]with even brighter light.
[00:02:39.194](upbeat music)

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Bright Light Rocks Harder: Creates Amazing Light Show

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