The new X-ray laser at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory could one day produce atomic "movies."

Reported for KQEDnews.org

Watching how plants transform sunlight into sugars, potentially leading to new fuels. Understanding how magnetic fields switch back and forth, a key step in developing faster computers.

Scientists have big hopes for the world’s first X-ray laser, a $420 million project unveiled Monday afternoon in Menlo Park.

“Science and technology has formed a lot of the basis of the wealth in the United States over the past several decades,” U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu told a standing-room-only audience at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, where the laser was dedicated. “And we will need science and technology to solve some of our most pressing problems, including that of transitioning to clean energy and solving our climate problem.”

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu talks to reporters. Also in the photo, Rep. Zoe Lofgren and Rep. Mike Honda . Courtesy of SLAC.

Chu said that the Obama administration wants to double science funding over the next decade.

Construction began on the project, known as the Linac Coherent Light Source in 2006, led by SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Stanford operates the SLAC National Laboratory for the Department of Energy, which provided the funding.

Creating atomic "movies"

The light source is the first of a new generation of imaging tools that produce X-ray pulses – like bursts of strobe lights – that are 100 to 1,000 times shorter than was previously possible. Scientists hope that the short pulses will allow them to take photos of atoms moving around, a process that happens in a period of time so short that it’s measured in a unit of time called a femtosecond, which lasts one millionth of one billionth of a second.

Flashing these very short pulses of X-rays onto atoms in motion is akin to using a very fast shutter speed in a still camera to make a crisp photo of a moving object, said SLAC director Persis Drell.

“You can see what atoms are doing, on the time scale they’re actually doing things, which is femtoseconds,” she said. “And no one’s ever come close to that before.” Scientists hope that one day these atomic “photos” will form the basis of atomic stop-motion “movies.”

Turning a nuisance into a powerful X-ray machine

Light sources are machines that use bright X-rays to make images. They’ve been around since the 1960s and have their origin in the particle accelerators of that era, where fundamental particles like electrons were smashed into other particles to investigate the tiny constituents of the atom. Researchers noticed that as the electrons sped up inside the accelerators, they let off X-rays, which were a nuisance because they meant that the electrons were losing energy.

But scientists quickly figured out that they had a powerful tool in their hands. These X-rays were several thousand times brighter than the ones used to make images of the human body in a hospital. Once researchers learned how to harness them, they had machines that could easily make images of the precise structure of tiny things like water molecules, viruses, and proteins inside the human body.

“From their structure we try to infer how they work,” said Joachim Stohr, director of the new light source. This has helped with drug development, he said.

“What we would love to do is take a movie of how a drug can inhibit a reaction or initiate a reaction,” Stohr said.

In this artist's rendition, the X-ray laser hits a biological sample and photographs it at the same time. The blue and orange square shows what a "photo" would look like. Courtesy of SLAC.

One billion times brighter

The new light source not only produces shorter pulses of X-rays than existing light sources at SLAC and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. These pulses are also a billion times brighter because all the photons, or packages of light, are made to act together, in what’s called a “coherent” way. This is what makes the new machine a laser, said SLAC physicist Paul Emma, who was in charge of getting the new light source up and running.

The new machine was turned on in April, 2009 and has operated as expected. Japan and Germany are also building X-ray lasers. And the Department of Energy has given the go-ahead for the design of phase two of the SLAC X-ray laser.

Putting SLAC’s linear accelerator to new use

To produce X-ray pulses, the new machine starts out with electrons that are accelerated to near the speed of light in the last third of SLAC’s two-mile linear particle accelerator. That linear accelerator, which was famous for being the longest in the world when it opened in 1968, was used to confirm the existence of the fundamental building blocks of the atom, called quarks. The linear accelerator is no longer used for particle physics experiments.

As the electrons travel down the linear accelerator, they’re squeezed into small bunches. Then a series of magnets called undulators, organized in a 430-foot line, wiggle the electron bunches back and forth and shake off the intense X-rays.

“This has to be done exquisitely precisely,” said SLAC director Drell. “Those undulators have to be aligned to maybe a fifth of the diameter of a human hair. It’s a major technical feat to get everything to line up to make this work.”

Monday’s event was something of a homecoming for Chu, a former professor of physics at Stanford and director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory until he was tapped by President Obama last year to run the Department of Energy.

Chu was part of committees in the 1990s that studied the viability of laser projects like the one he dedicated Monday. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997 for research into the cooling and trapping of atoms with laser light.

Of the new laser, Chu said that “it feeds all the technologies, from the material science that is needed for the next generation of semi-conductors and computers, to the pharmaceuticals, the biotechnology, and finally, to the energy technologies that we’re going to have to develop in the future.”

Video: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory Director Persis Drell explains how the new X-ray laser could help scientists learn more about how plants turn the energy from the sun into fuel.

More video:
Watch QUEST TV's segment about the history of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, called Homegrown Particle Accelerators.

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Perhaps no single development of the last century has been more influential or more important than the laser.

The concept of discovery is a powerful sentiment in science. Television’s Discovery Channel and print journalism’s Discover Magazine have folded the word into their identities, and as a child that my iconic scientist was a paleontologist, literally unearthing discoveries of the prehistoric wilderness. Just as motivating, however, is the concept of invention, and perhaps no single development of the last century has been more influential or more important than the laser. In 2010 the laser turns 50, and to celebrate, a group of organizations including the American Physical Society, the Optical Society, SPIE and IEEE Photonics Society have organized a year-long series of events this year dubbed LaserFest.

UC Berkeley has been celebrating LaserFest this past week with special exhibits and events over the weekend at the Lawrence Hall of Science, and a special lecture on Monday the 25th by Roger Falcone, Bob Byer, and Nobel laureate Charles Townes, also at the Lawrence Hall of Science.

Theodore Maiman built the first laser out of a rod of pink ruby in 1960. However, the laser’s precursor and underlying principle belongs to Townes. In 1954, he and colleagues constructed the ammonia maser, a stunning proof-of-principle device demonstrating that intense beams of light within a narrow color range could be produced. A flurry of excitement and research efforts followed aimed primarily at developing masers that could work at higher and higher frequencies of light.

As maser research matured the name changed as well. A high-frequency MASER (the acronym stands for Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) became the optical MASER. Then at a conference in 1959, Gordon Gould coined it as the LASER. (LASER is an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation.)” One of the conference’s organizers, Arthur Schawlow, rebutted that these new devices would be more important as oscillators rather than amplifiers, so perhaps they should really be calling it the LOSER (see the recent article in Physics Today). Curiously, substituting the O never caught on.

The laser’s influence in science and society, however, has been dramatic. We use lasers to read our hard drives and play DVDs. We use them to improve our vision. Lasers play an integral role in security systems. They are a crucial component of our ability to keep time accurately. The world’s biggest laser in Livermore could be on the verge of igniting fusion reactions. We even shot a laser at the moon, waited for it to bounce back, and used the information to calculate the moon’s distance to the Earth with unprecedented accuracy.

Time will tell what the laser’s future applications might be. Personally, I am rooting for a sign of extraterrestrial life from the Optical SETI project. The research collaboration’s website says that “A tightly focused light beam, such as a laser, can be 10 times as bright as the Sun and be easily observed from enormous distances.” Then again, if the aliens do decide to shoot a message our way via laser, let’s just hope that that they don’t decide to crank up the power so high that we all get vaporized.

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Kevin Cain, Digital Capture Supervisor for Maya Skies, demonstrates his innovative image-capture process that replaces expensive custom hardware with affordable consumer equipment.

The film is groundbreaking for a couple of reasons.  It’s the first time the Chabot center is using state-of-the art laser scanning technology to create one of its films.  For Tales of Maya Skies, a team of 25 people spent seven weeks scanning the ruins of the ancient city of Chichén Itzá, in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.  This technology is widely used by Hollywood productions because of the flexibility it gives a creative team.  Once they’ve scanned a particular site, they can play with any one of its variables: they can create the illusion that the camera is moving in crazy ways; they can manipulate the light conditions, and they can change the look of the location in any way they want.

The creative team behind Tales of Maya Skies, made up of, among others, Emeryville nonprofit Insight, the San Francisco animation companies Digitrove and Palma VFX, the ARTS Lab at the University of New Mexico, producer Konda Mason and director Jin An Wong, are taking advantage of all the possibilities that the scanning of Chichén Itzá provides.  The audience will be immersed in full-color animations that go beyond showing the ruins of Chichén Itzá as they exist today.  Instead, through laborious historical research, the creative team has reconstructed what the monumental city must have looked like at its peak 1,200 years ago, with temples painted in bright reds, greens, blues and yellows, and incense burning and flags waving atop them.

By using the 3-D digital images created through laser scanners as the raw material for the animations in Tales of Maya Skies, the film is also breaking ground in more indirect, but perhaps even more important, ways.  Insight, the Emeryville nonprofit that oversaw the scanning at Chichén Itzá, as well as the Orinda-based CyArk, another nonprofit that worked on the project, are engaged in scanning irreplaceable sites around the world, documenting them for the benefit of the archaeologists charged with preserving them, as well as for generations to come, which might lose the real thing to natural disasters, war, or the passage of time.  CyArk’s co-founder, Ben Kacyra, has set out to use laser scanners to document 500 sites in five years.

But laser scanners, for all the wonderful detail, speed and flexibility they offer, are expensive.  They can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $150,000.  That’s why Kevin Cain, Insight’s director, has been testing an alternative system that can accomplish the same thing at a fraction of the cost. All the gear he needs is a digital camera, a flash and software, at a total cost of under $2,000.  Here’s how it works.  For every 32-square-foot swatch of an object, Cain takes 10 still photos with his camera and flash.  Then he uses the photos to reconstruct the object based on the brightness of each individual point on its surface.  The system is based on a principle of physics discovered in the 18^th century.  The high quality of today’s cheap digital cameras is what makes it possible to apply this principle to create an inexpensive image-capturing system.

“With this new technique, our ultimate goal is to be able to provide very low-cost, very usable results for archaeologists,” Cain said, “because until the price goes almost to zero, archaeologists aren’t going to be able to adopt it, just given the realities of their field.”  To illustrate those realities, Cain used the example of the work that Insight has done in Egypt for the past decade.  Each year they join a team of archaeologists for their field work at the Tomb of Ramses.  A complete yearly field season costs under $50,000, many times the cost of an inexpensive laser scanner.

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Governor Schwarzenegger, clad in a pink tie– an odd sartorial choice for dedicating this giant hulk of a building housing 500 trillion watt laser housed within– nevertheless succeeded in channeling at least some of his Hollywood days. When they originally visited the facility last November, "we were so excited that we said, 'We'll be back.'"

The project's goal is to focus 192 laser beams onto a BB-sized capsule of hydrogen fuel in order to heat it to the point of ignition, that is, to achieve a nuclear fusion reaction where more energy comes out of the capsule than is put in. Fusion is the common process for creating energy in the Sun, and has been demonstrated on Earth both in the apocalyptic specter of thermonuclear weapons and in the more hope-inspiring form of plasma reactors such as those at the Joint European Torus (JET) in Britain. However, ignition has yet to be demonstrated, as JET requires a constant influx of energy greater than anything it is capable of producing. If all goes well within the next several months, ignition could be achieved at NIF as early as 2010.

For all of these exciting aspirations and promise of new technology, the press' reaction to NIF throughout the twelve years of its construction has been often lukewarm, and at worst scornful. Some of this has been deserved, and it is certainly true that the facility's $3.5 billion dollar construction cost is a hard price tag to swallow.

However, NIF is a worthy scientific cause and might well turn out to be an excellent investment. To put things a little bit into perspective, other large science projects are similarly expensive. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN and the Hubble Space Telescope have both been estimated at about $6 billion. Dianne Feinstein argued in the past (and reminded the audience at Friday's dedication) that Enron needlessly cost $9 billion during the California Energy Crisis. Put another way, with $9 billion you could (a) experience rolling blackouts while Enron power traders cheer for wildfires ravaging your countryside, or (b) assemble the world's most powerful laser and use it to bring the nation to the brink of being able to replicate, in a controlled manner, the sorts of reactions that power the Sun. Twice.

The physics promise of the NIF, meanwhile, is truly fascinating on all three fronts of NIF's stated goals: energy production, basic research, and national security.

Fission reactors, which extract atomic energy from the splitting of large atoms such as uranium, have been a viable source of energy since 1954. However, the waste they produce remains radioactive for thousands of years. Potential fusion plants, on the other hand, would operate by an altogether different mechanism: the merging of much smaller hydrogen atoms. Radioactive byproducts are still generated, but the timescale for their radioactivity is shorter, on the order of 10 to 20 years.

A significant line of inquiry has already been pursued toward commercially viable nuclear fusion at JET and its planned successor, ITER. Such experiments employ powerful magnetic fields to maintain hydrogen plasma in a confined space and heat it to the point of fusion as it soars around inside a doughnut-shaped ring.

NIF serves as a valuable compliment to these magnetic confinement experiments. Instead of forcing a fusion reaction to perpetuate using costly magnetic fields, the NIF laser will attempt to blast its fuel with so much energy in such a short time period that the fuel will have no time to expand before it undergoes fusion. "If it works, developments at NIF would entirely reshape the dialogue on nuclear fusion energy," said Brian MacGowan, a NIF Program Director.

Even the most optimistic estimates place the viability of these types of energy sources 20 years into the future. NIF itself will never be able to function as a power generator even if all experiments performed at the facility proceed exactly as planned. The raw potential for such power extraction is nevertheless tantalizing.

Additionally, there is basic research potential for NIF beyond fusion power. Stars are typically easy to observe from a distance but inevitably too far away and too inhospitable to explore up close. A miniaturized version of the reaction as created in the NIF target bay could provide an interesting model system. There is no way to tell, but it could be that hand in hand with this ability comes a better understanding of some of the deepest outstanding questions in physics as well, such as the nature of dark energy and dark matter.

NIF also offers a unique way for the U.S. to test the effects of nuclear weapons without violating the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. NNSA Administrator Tom D'Agostino noted at the dedication that, particularly as the United States' nuclear arsenal ages, this will provide the U.S. with invaluable data.

We may emerge from this economic crisis a poorer, humbler country. Still, I hope that we are not yet so humble that we have lost the ability to dream big, and not yet so poor that we can no longer actively pursue at least a few of those dreams.

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In celebration of the operational launch of the NIF, engineers & scientists from the facility are presenting a series of talks and discussions geared for the general public.

Monday 4/20

Ed Moses, Principal Associate Director, NIF at Down to a Science in San Francisco

Tuesday 5/12

Ed Moses, Principal Associate Director, NIF at Café Scientifique Silicon Valley

Thursday 6/4

Richard Boyd, Science Director, NIF at Science Buzz Café in Sebastopol

Tuesday 6/9

Jeffery F. Latkowski, Chief Engineer for the Laser Inertial Fusion-Fission Energy (LIFE) program at Ask a Scientist in San Francisco

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Inside the National Ignition Facility.

So in a nutshell, what is fusion? And how do lasers work? Why are you asking me? I was the kid who always struggled with math and would get hives on the eve of a high school science test.

Luckily, there are some darn good teachers out there and we were fortunate enough to feature one of them in our story. Richard Muller is a professor of physics at the University of California and has also become something of a web phenomenon. Thousands of "students" all over the world have viewed his lecture series titled "Physics for Future Presidents" on YouTube and Cal's own website.

Muller designed this class to "stress conceptual understanding rather than math, with applications to current events." As he told us, "imagine looking out on your classroom and picturing out there is the future president of the United States. What do you want that person to know?" What comes out is an explanation of the physics of energy, nuclear weapons, radioactivity, relativity and the universe– all explained in a way that the physics-challenged, like myself or maybe a future president, can understand.

Watch the "Super Laser at the National Ignition Facility" TV Story online, as well as find additional links and resources.

Chris Bauer is a Segment Producer for television on QUEST.

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You may listen to the "Super Laser" radio report online, as well as find additional links and resources. Also don't miss our behind-the-scenes photos for this report.

Amy Standen is a Reporter for QUEST and Radio News at KQED-FM.

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