London, July 28 (IANS) Scientists have created a transparent form of aluminium by bombarding the metal with the world’s most powerful soft X-ray laser.
The discovery was made possible with the development of a new source of radiation that is 10 billion times brighter than any synchrotron in the world (for example Britain’s Diamond Light Source).

The FLASH laser, based in Hamburg, Germany, produces extremely brief pulses of soft X-ray light, each of which is more powerful than the total output of a plant powering an entire city.

‘Transparent aluminium’ previously only existed in science fiction, featuring in the movie Star Trek IV, but the real material is an exotic new state of matter with implications for planetary science and nuclear fusion.

An international team, led by Oxford University scientists, reported that a short pulse from the FLASH laser ‘knocked out’ a core electron from every aluminium atom in a sample without disrupting the metal’s crystalline structure. This turned the aluminium nearly invisible to extreme ultraviolet radiation.

The Oxford team, along with their international colleagues, focussed all this power down into a spot with a diameter less than a twentieth of the width of a human hair. At such high intensities the aluminium turned transparent.

Whilst the invisible effect lasted for only an extremely brief period — an estimated 40 femtoseconds — it demonstrates that such an exotic state of matter can be created using very high power X-ray sources.

“What we have created is a completely new state of matter nobody has seen before,” said Justin Wark, physics professor at the Oxford University and a study co-author.

“Transparent aluminium is just the start. The physical properties of the matter we are creating are relevant to the conditions inside large planets,” said Wark.

“We also hope that by studying it we can gain a greater understanding of what is going on during the creation of ‘miniature stars’ created by high-power laser implosions, which may one day allow the power of nuclear fusion to be harnessed here on Earth,” he added.

Wark added: “What is particularly remarkable about our experiment is that we have turned ordinary aluminium into this exotic new material in a single step by using this very powerful laser.”

These findings were reported in Nature Physics.