Silver Foam and High-Power Lasers Create the World’s Brightest X-Ray

A groundbreaking innovation at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has combined high-power lasers with an ultralight silver metal foam to create the brightest X-ray source ever recorded, boasting twice the intensity of anything previously achieved.

Applications of Ultra-Bright X-Rays

While ultra-bright X-rays may not be useful in everyday life, they play a crucial role in advanced research. Applications include studying the atomic-level structure of materials, observing chemical reactions in real-time, obtaining detailed images of biological samples, and analyzing complex molecules.

These exceptionally bright X-rays are particularly important at facilities like LLNL, which leads cutting-edge research on nuclear fusion. Beyond scientific exploration, these studies have practical applications, such as developing fusion reactors and ensuring the safety and reliability of the United States’ nuclear weapons stockpile.

The key advantage of these X-rays lies in their extremely high resolution, making them ideal for examining highly dense materials, such as the plasmas generated during inertial confinement fusion.In this process, high-energy laser beams bombard pellets of deuterium and tritium. Interestingly, researchers at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) use the same super-lasers designed for fusion research to produce this new ultra-bright X-ray light.

A New Approach to Generating X-Rays

Traditionally, X-rays, like those used in dental offices, are generated by bombarding a metal target with an electron beam. However, this new system replaces the electron beam with a laser and uses a special metal target made of silver foam.

Researchers create this foam, shaping it into 4-mm-wide cylinders using silver nanowires suspended in a special mold.After undergoing a supercritical drying process to remove the solution, the result is a metal foam with just one-thousandth the density of regular silver—about the same density as air.

Why Use “Fluffy” Silver?

The highly porous structure of the silver foam allows heat to flow much faster through it. As a result, the entire cylinder can heat uniformly in just 1.5 billionths of a second.

The outcome is an X-ray source with energy exceeding 20,000 electron volts. While this might seem small on an everyday scale, it is extremely significant in the realm of nuclear physics.

According to LLNL researchers, this new X-ray technology will not only deepen our understanding of fusion processes but also enable the study of the hot, bright metal plasmas produced, which exist far from thermal equilibrium.

These results mean we need to rethink our assumptions about heat transport and how we calculate it in these particular metal plasmas, said Jeff Colvin, a scientist at LLNL.

Read the orginal article on: New Atlas

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