Exceptionally high reaction gains of hydrogen protons measured with the boron isotope 11 are compared with other fusion reactions. This is leading to the conclusion that secondary avalanche reactions are happening and confirming the results of high-gain, neutron-free, clean, safe, low-cost, and long-term available energy. The essential basis is the unusual non-thermal block-ignition scheme with picosecond laser pulses of extremely high powers above the petawatt range.

An ultrafast laser irradiation method for the removal of corrosion from Daguerreotypes without detrimentally affecting image quality has been developed. Corrosion products such as silver oxide and silver sulfide may be removed by chemical cleaning but these reactions are hard to control and are often damaging to the underlying silver, ruining the image. The Ti:Sapphire 150 fs laser pulses used in this study are focused to a beam diameter of 60 μm and are normally incident to the Daguerreotype. It was found that the corrosion layer has a lower material removal threshold than silver allowing for removal of corrosion with minimal removal of vital information contained in the silver substrate.

A 100-ps-resolution electron pulse was used to study a 25-nm thick gold single crystal irradiated by a synchronized infrared optical pulse. The change in electron diffraction intensity following laser heating (the Debye-Waller effect) was measured as a function of delay time. The relaxation of a crystal lattice distortion in the surface region appears to explain an observed oscillation in time of the scattered electron intensity. This novel technique provides a sensitive structure probe for short-time dynamics and is, we believe, the fastest lattice temperature probe.

The physical processes occurring during the initial stages of ultrafast laser heating of metals are described. Femtosecond laser irradiation is used to create nonequilibrium heating in metals. In such a nonequilibrium state, the electron temperature can be heated up to a few thousand degrees above the lattice temperature. Electron-lattice relaxation is time-resolved in copper and found to be 1 – 4 ps depending on the laser heating ffuence. The technique of time-resolved electron diffraction (a lattice structural and temperature probe) is described. Utilization of this technique for lattice temperature measurement of thin metal films is demonstrated.