Scientists produce firsts with light burst

UPTON, N.Y., July 24 (UPI) -- U.S. government scientists have generated extremely short pulses of light that are the strongest of their type ever produced.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory said the experiment might prove invaluable in investigating the ultra-fast motion of atoms and electrons.

The scientists at the facility's National Synchrotron Light Source Laboratory also reported using the high intensity light to make the first observations of a phenomenon called cross-phase modulation -- a characteristic that could be used in numerous new light source technologies.

"The goal is really to understand the properties of materials," said NSLS researcher Yuzhen Shen, the lead author of the paper. "One might ask what happens in a solid when light, electricity, or sound goes through it, and it's all related to atoms in a crystal wiggling around or the movement of electrons. So the effort surrounding ultra-fast pulses is going into making tools to probe the real fundamental properties of materials on the scales at which they move."

The experiment is described in the online edition of Physical Review Letters.