Facility builds world’s most powerful ultraviolet laser

BEI J ING: Chinese scientists announced they have built a facility that can generate the world’s brightest extreme ultraviolet (EUV) free electron laser.

The facility in Dalian, a coastal city in Northeast China’s Liaoning province, can generate 140 trillion photons per laser pulse in one picosecond.

The Dalian Coherent Light Source (DCLS) facility was jointly built by the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics and Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) with a total investment of about 140 million yuan (RM90.96mil).

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, a CAS academician 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.

“We expect that the facility will become a new tool for important scientific discoveries and international scientific collaboration,” Yang said.