Researchers had been struggling for almost ten years for building a tabletop X ray laser which could be implemented for biological and medical imaging but now a research team at the University of Colorado has created a new technique for generation of laser like X ray beams. It took almost fifty years for the researchers to figure out how a cost effective and X-ray laser could be built which could offer super high imaging resolution.
This development is expected to benefit other fields too such as biology and medicine too. With higher resolution it would be possible to detect an even small cancer which is not possible in normal circumstances. Powerful laser was used for plucking an electron from an atom of argon and then was slammed into the same atom. This resulted in a direct beam of X-rays.
One of the problems which was being encountered was that X-ray waves did not march out in steps and in order to counter this problem the researchers sent out some weak pulses of visible light in the gas in the opposite direction of the laser beam for generation of X-rays. The beam was found out to manipulate the electrons and this lead to the strengthening of the beams by more than a hundred times.
Via nanowerk
