30 years and counting, the X-ray laser lives on
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Researchers used two beams on Nova for X-ray laser experiments. X-ray lasers have evolved quite a bit since this circa 1985 image. I was working with them (Chapline and Wood) a bit because I was interested in this, said Dennis Matthews, a longtime LLNL laser experimentalist, now at UC Davis. London worked with Rosen as a postdoc at the time. Lawrence Livermore researchers later developed table-top X-ray lasers to initially explore plasmas (also known as a fourth state of matter), but eventually X-ray lasers moved into a variety of fields in the material science and biology worlds by supplying detailed information about the molecular-scale structure of new and existing materials.