Tenio Popmintchev

New Capabilities

Led the helium experiment

For decades, the rule for laser-driven X-ray emission was one electron, one cutoff. A freed electron could gain only so much energy from a laser field before it returned to its atom, and the light it released faded above a predictable maximum. A team at TU Wien and the University of California San Diego has now exceeded that limit in helium by timing two electrons to return together.

Updated Nov 1