{"id":235397,"date":"2026-04-16T22:24:47","date_gmt":"2026-04-17T03:24:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/laser-plasma-accelerator-drives-free-electron-laser-for-record-8-hours"},"modified":"2026-04-16T22:24:47","modified_gmt":"2026-04-17T03:24:47","slug":"laser-plasma-accelerator-drives-free-electron-laser-for-record-8-hours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/laser-plasma-accelerator-drives-free-electron-laser-for-record-8-hours","title":{"rendered":"Laser-plasma accelerator drives free-electron laser for record 8 hours"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/laser-plasma-accelerator-drives-free-electron-laser-for-record-8-hours2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that a laser-plasma accelerator can reliably drive a free-electron laser for more than eight hours. Published in <a href=\"https:\/\/journals.aps.org\/prab\/abstract\/10.1103\/z2d3-bhyt\" target=\"_blank\"><i>Physical Review Accelerators and Beams<\/i><\/a>, the result was achieved by a team led by Finn Kohrell at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in collaboration with Texas-based company Tau Systems\u2014and could soon make the technology vastly more accessible for a broad range of applications in industry and research.<\/p>\n<p>Free-electron lasers (FELs) generate intense, coherent pulses of light, most often in the ultraviolet to X-ray range. This involves sending high-energy electron bunches through an undulator: a device that alternates a magnetic field to accelerate electrons back and forth, causing them to emit increasingly bright and coherent radiation.<\/p>\n<p>By harnessing this radiation as laser light, researchers can probe matter at the atomic scale and capture ultrafast processes in real time, making it invaluable to a vast array of applications.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that a laser-plasma accelerator can reliably drive a free-electron laser for more than eight hours. Published in Physical Review Accelerators and Beams, the result was achieved by a team led by Finn Kohrell at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in collaboration with Texas-based company Tau Systems\u2014and could soon make [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1497],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-235397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235397"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235397\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}