Henry Kapteyn and Margaret Murnane are JILA scientists who like to design new lasers. Now, they’ve got a really big job on their hands: They want to design a brand new X-ray laser. One day, they want their X-ray laser to be as powerful as anything in science fiction.

While working on their X-ray laser, Henry and Margaret figured out that if you zap a molecule with a powerful laser, the molecule will dance and send out a beam of X-rays. The pattern in the X-ray beam records the drumbeat to which the molecules dance. They’ve watched it happen!

One of Henry and Margaret’s students drew a picture of the dancing molecule so you could imagine what it looks like. The wide red band is light from a powerful red laser. The thinner purple band is the X-ray beam made by the molecule. The wavy rainbow shows an electron moving away from the molecule and slamming back into it — just like a boomerang. The collisions are what make the X-ray beam. —Julie Phillips

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