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(PhysOrg.com) -- Identifying chemicals from a distance could take a step forward with the introduction of a two-laser system being developed at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Researchers working at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have used the world's most powerful X-ray laser to create and probe a two-million-degree piece of matter in a controlled way for the first time. This feat, reported today in Nature, takes scientists a significant step forward in understanding the most extreme matter found in the hearts of stars and giant planets, and could help experiments aimed at recreating the nuclear fusion process that powers the sun.

(PhysOrg.com) -- The quest to develop a so-called room-temperature superconductor – one that exhibits lossless electronic transmission – has long fueled both popular and scientific imagination. At the same time, however, ongoing efforts to raise the still-frigid temperatures at which certain materials display superconductivity are making incremental progress. That research – historically based on lattice and/or spin-based interpretations of electron pairing – has now taken a potentially significant step forward thanks to a theoretical view of how electron orbital pairing in a class of materials known as ferropnictides may provide a new road to high transition temperature superconductivity.