Seeing the light in femtoseconds

Australia's first femtosecond laser facility has opened at Swinburne University of Technology's Hawthorne campus in Melbourne.

The facility will house femtosecond high power lasers, which are able to produce pulses of light at femtosecond - one billionth of one millionth of a second - speed.

The facility will be run by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coherent X-ray Science (CXS), which is administered by Melbourne University, in conjunction with Swinburne. The centre works closely with the Australian Synchrotron.

"This is the first such facility in Australia," University of Melbourne Federation Fellow and CXS director, Professor Keith Nugent, said.

"This laser produces light so intense that matter behaves in completely different ways."

Nugent said the laser will be used for imaging biological samples and will help develop new applications in the study of atoms and molecules, the structure of solids and imaging at the nano-scale.

"It will open the door to completely new ways of seeing biological tissue with very fine detail and in three-dimensions," he said.

"One of our first jobs is to explore the structure of the malaria parasite, yielding insight into the nature of one of the world's most important health problems."

The facility was funded by a $1.8 million grant from the Victorian government.