Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) team drawing its members from the Materials Sciences Division (MSD), the Center for Beam Physics in the Accelerator and Fusion Research Division, and the Advanced Light Source (ALS) has succeeded in generating 300-femtosecond pulses of synchrotron radiation at the ALS synchrotron radiation machine. Though this "proof-of-principle" experiment made use of visible light on a borrowed beamline, the laser "time-slicing" technique at the heart of the demonstration will soon be applied in a new bend-magnet beamline designed explicitly for the production of femtosecond pulses of X-rays to study long-range and local order in condensed matter with ultrafast time resolution. An undulator beamline based on the same technique has been proposed that will dramatically increase the flux and brightness.