X-ray laser fires most powerful pulse ever recorded

The Linac Coherent Light Source in California fired an X-ray pulse that lasted only a few hundred billionths of a billionth of a second but carried nearly a terawatt of power.

The most powerful pulse of X-rays ever reported has been produced at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California. In only 440 billionths of a billionth of a second, or attoseconds, it packed nearly a terawatt of power – a thousand times more than the average yearly output of a nuclear power plant.

“In the near term, it will be hard to do better,” says Agostino Marinelli at SLAC, who worked on the project.