On Thu, Nov 12, 2015 at 9:05 AM, Stephen Cooke <stephen_coo...@hotmail.com> wrote:
I just read this article in Space Daily: > > > http://www.spacedaily.com/m/reports/UMD_discovery_could_enable_portable_particle_accelerators_999.html > I read the following detail with interest: We have accelerated high-charge electron beams to more than 10 million > electron volts using only millijoules of laser pulse energy. This is the > energy consumed by a typical household lightbulb in one-thousandth of a > second. This suggests that a beam of eV-energy photons from a laser could stimulate inner-shell transitions in heavy atoms with binding energies in the 10s of keVs. A corollary is that the same thing could conceivably be accomplished in nature simply through high levels of heat (UV photons), through some unknown mechanism. Eric
