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Xinhua
January 16, 2017
A scientist monitors a facility that can generate the world’s brightest extreme ultraviolet laser yesterday in the northeast city of Dalian. — Xinhua
CHINESE scientists said they have built a facility that can generate the world’s brightest extreme ultraviolet free electron laser.
The facility in Dalian, a coastal city in Liaoning Province, can generate 140 trillion photons per laser pulse in one picosecond.
The Dalian Coherent Light Source facility was jointly built by the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics and Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences with a total investment of 140 million yuan (US$20 million).
The flashes of light will illuminate new aspects of the microscopic world.
“EUV light sources are especially useful for sensitive detection of atoms, molecules and clusters,” said Yang Xueming, an academician at CAS and deputy director of the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics.
Brightness and pulse duration of the light source are key to such detection.
“The brighter the light source, the more clearly we can see the small number of atoms or molecules,” said Yang.
“Since many physical, chemical and biological reactions happen on a time scale of femtoseconds or picoseconds, we need high-speed ‘flashlight’ to capture those moments to study the process,” Yang said.
The DCLS will play a unique and important role in exploring the unknown material world and promoting technological progress, said Yang.
“EUV free electron laser light sources have wide applications in the study of basic energy science, chemistry, physics and atmospheric sciences,” Yang said.
