A team of researchers has discovered a new way to produce high energy photon beams.
The new method makes it possible to produce these gamma rays in a highly efficient way, compared with incumbent technique.
The obtained energy is a billion times higher than the energy of photons in visible light.
These high intensity gamma rays significantly exceed all known limits and pave the way towards new fundamental studies.
"When we exceed the limit of what is currently possible, we can see deeper into the basic elements of nature. We can dive into the deepest part of the atomic nuclei," said researcher Arkady Gonoskov from Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden.
The new method is an outcome of collaboration between Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, Institute of Applied Physics and Lobachevsky University in Russia and University of Plymouth in the UK.
Physicists in different fields, as well as computer scientists, have managed to work out the numerical models and analytic estimates for simulating these ultra-strong gamma rays in a new and somehow unexpected way.
In normal cases, if you shoot a laser pulse at an object, all the particles scatter.
But if the laser light is intense enough and all parameters are right, the researchers have found that the particles are instead trapped.
They form a cloud where particles of matter and antimatter are created and start to behave in a very special, unusual way.
"The cloud of trapped particles efficiently converts the laser energy into cascades of high energy photons - a phenomena that is very fortunate. It's an amazing thing that the photons from this source can be of such high energy," said another researcher Mattias Marklund.
The discovery is highly relevant for the future large scale laser facilities that are under development right now.
The results appear in the journal Physical Review X.
